File 1: Code Veronica
by Q. Alias
Summary: [Complete] [Alternate timeline] RETRIEVING FILES... SUCCESS. DATA CORRUPTION DETECTED. Code: Veronica (redacted) Alexander Ashford (redacted) may be inconsistent with data on-file regarding Antarctica Incident and Subject 014 Harman. Subject's connection to T-Veronica host Alexia Ashford is still unclear. Further data is restricted. Terminating connection.
1. Part One - Rockfort

**Downloading Video Logs...**

* * *

The newscaster said it would be hot, and then it would rain, and it would rain for days.

Grayson didn't mind the rain. His chores rarely took him beyond the house, and on the occasions they did, he went no farther than the yard. The precariousness of Alfred's psychotic condition often interrupted his work routine. During one particular episode, Alfred had shot one of the Spanish gardeners from the balcony of the Palace, where Alfred maintained his office, and had said it was because they had looked at him wrong.

He swept and vacuumed the hallway, dusted the furniture, organized the shelves, and the bric-a-brac Alfred had never bothered to put away in boxes. Among the bric-a-brac, Grayson found a silver dragonfly barrette, and frowned. It had once belonged to Alexia, Alfred's twin sister, who had died, fifteen years ago, in a freak lab accident. That had been the December of 1983. Since then, Grayson had never enjoyed another Christmas.

He heard footsteps, and knew without looking that it was Alfred. They were the only people who lived in the mansion. The rest of the servants—Cara, Juni, Aileen, and his father Scott—had either died, or had gone away. Grayson dropped the barrette into his pocket, before Alfred could see it.

"Morning, Alfred." Alfred was pretty lenient with him about formalities. Grayson guessed it was because he fulfilled the unique role as the only person Alfred had frequent contact with, like a missionary who had made contact with some secret Borneo tribe, and now that tribe saw the missionary as some inextricable conduit to the Outside. "Listened to the newscast," he added. "They're calling for storms."

Alfred was a tall, thin man, and had the sort of colorless bored European face Grayson had observed in war-time photos of SS officers. His eyes were the precise shade of blue of the inside of a glacier, and his hair was Jean Harlow blonde, always slicked back with pomade which smelled strongly of vanilla.

"What else is new?" said Alfred. Alfred had a peculiar taste in wardrobe, which seemed to fluctuate indecisively between military formal, and yacht club. Today he'd picked yacht club, and wore a white polo and pants. "I assume it's tropical storms. Should I put the word out to the boys down in the prison compound?"

"I don't tell you how to do your job, Alfred," said Grayson, and shrugged. "But if you're asking for my _opinion_? I would."

Alfred nodded. "I suppose I'll tell them then," he said.

"Where are you going anyway?"

"Not that it's a servant's business, but I'm going to the Palace," he said, in his usual haughty way. The haughtiness didn't faze Grayson anymore; he'd been raised alongside the twins, and had resigned to the fact, a long time ago, that Alfred's sense of importance had evolved from an annoying quirk to an inseparable component of his personality. "I have to process new prisoners." Alfred rolled his eyes. "I don't know why they waste my time with this processing nonsense. Should have just shot them, and been done with it."

Grayson asked, "Who's the prisoner?" There weren't many boundaries when it came to Alfred and him, though Alfred liked to pretend there were several. Grayson could pretty much ask him whatever he wanted, and did not have to worry about the violent repercussions that usually came from asking Alfred intrusive questions about his work. When it came down to it, Alfred needed him, and Alfred knew he needed him.

Alfred looked as if he was about to argue that the prisoner wasn't any of Grayson's business. Then said, " _Prisoners_. Plural. I know one is named David Burnside, and has a teenage son Steve." He made a dismissive gesture with his hand.

"What did they do?"

"You're very brave, poking your nose in places it doesn't belong, Harman." To anyone else, the implied threat would have been a very real one; but to Grayson, it was empty, typical posturing. Alfred shook his Aryan head, and sighed like an exasperated father. "David was caught trying to sell information he'd peeled from Umbrella's databanks. It was trifling data, really. But a point is a point."

"The kid helped him?"

"Doubtful. But my superiors said to lock him up." Alfred shrugged. He paused, seemingly considering something. "Why don't you come with me, Harman? I can show you around the compound."

"Depends," said Grayson. "Did you take your meds, Alfred?"

"Yes, I took the damn funny pills," said Alfred. "Do you want to come or not? I haven't all bloody day."

"Sure. I've finished my chores anyway."

Alfred dusted a piece of lint from Grayson's black suit jacket. He frowned suddenly and adjusted the knot in Grayson's tie. Then he said, impatiently, "An Ashford won't be accompanied by a ragamuffin."

The air was boiling in the prison compound, as if it was trapped under a permanent inversion layer of human sweat. Armed guards from the Umbrella Security Service ushered prisoners between barracks, which were dilapidated structures cobbled together from sheet metal, plywood, and old bricks. The prisoners were a sorry-looking lot with sunken faces, their hair scraggly and dirty, and clothes little more than rags with dark sweat-rings around the armpits and neck. One prisoner, who might have been Hispanic, or perhaps a very tanned white guy, sucked on a cheap-smelling cigarette, watching them with a helpless animal look.

"Cigarettes aren't contraband?" asked Grayson. He was beginning to regret picking a black suit to wear. The prison compound was unforgivably hot, a hell-heat that dried his throat and hurt his lungs when he breathed.

Alfred looked at the cigarette man, the man's dirty brown face reflected in his sunglasses. Unlike Grayson, Alfred seemed to enjoy the heat, like some cold-blooded animal. Grayson was sure there was a joke in there somewhere, something about cold-blooded animals rarely exerting energy on their prey. "It hardly matters. They're not leaving this camp," he said. "Killing themselves with cigarettes makes my life easier." When Alfred passed the prisoners, they'd go quiet, and the guards would salute and say things were good, and it was a scorcher, wasn't it, Warden? Alfred rarely replied to the guards, and whenever he did, he was curt. "I hate these people," he added, as they rounded a corner and went through a security gate.

The compound was an enormous ferroconcrete sprawl, divided into a military compound, where the Umbrella Security Service trained, and the prison itself, where the prisoners slept and worked. Grayson asked what sort of work they did, and Alfred said they built things, or performed repairs on the compound ("It had been my suggestion," Alfred had proudly informed him. "Having the prisoners do basic maintenance cuts down upkeep cost, so I have a wider budget to work into the U.S.S"). He saw a few prisoners toiling under the sun like an old-fashioned chain-gang, while the soldiers watched them. One of the prisoners, who seemed to be an older, maybe middle-aged man, suddenly keeled over; the prisoners kept working, and the guards did nothing.

They came to the prison gate. It was a large metal gate with a guardhouse, and a kennel for the prison dogs. A convoy of jeeps came up the road, kicking up clouds of dust which seemed to freeze in the air like a photograph. The driver of one of the jeeps, a large square-faced African, got out and went around to the back of the vehicle. He unloaded several people from the back of the jeep, still dressed in their civilian clothes. Grayson counted fifteen. They looked confused and scared, or very tired, as if they had already resigned to their fate and no longer cared about their predicament.

"Greetings," said Alfred, with a too-cheery smile. "Welcome to Rockfort Prison. I am the Warden Alfred Ashford." He surveyed the group appraisingly. The smile was gone now. "You are going to hate every moment of your miserable lives here," he said. "You will work. You will work _hard_ until you cannot work any longer, and then you will die, and you will not be remembered. Laziness is not tolerated in my prison. Those who decide they are too good for the work here will find themselves _wishing_ for death. But do your part, and there may be some reward for you. I am not without compassion."

 _Compassion_ , Grayson thought, rolling his eyes. He was sure Alfred didn't even know what the word compassion meant. He scanned the group and wondered which ones were David and Steve Burnside. He was pretty sure he spotted Steve, at the far back of the group. Steve was the only teenager in the group, and still had that scared kid look on his face. He was tall and thin, with a shag of red hair—almost a dead-ringer for DiCaprio. Grayson assumed the heavy-set red-haired man beside Steve was his father David.

One of the prisoners spoke up. He looked like a cokehead. Grayson knew the type from when he'd tended a bar in Raccoon City called The Black Room, which had almost exclusively catered to a clientele of cokeheads and broke stoners. "Hey, sweetheart," said the man to Alfred, and he was grinning."You gotta sister?"

Grayson shook his head. There was always that one idiot in a group who wanted to play the tough guy card; though Grayson figured it was just the drugs, and the guy still hadn't come off his kick. Alfred looked at the cokehead, said, "I do, as a matter of fact," and shot the man in the head. Pieces of brain spattered the face of the man who stood behind the cokehead. The man looked like he was trying hard not to vomit. "Would anyone else like to ask about my sister?" asked Alfred, brandishing his pistol. "Go on, don't be shy now!"

He put his hand on Alfred's shoulder and leaned toward him. "I think they get the point, Alfred."

Alfred said to the African, "Get these filthy nobodies to processing." The African nodded, and his team herded the prisoners through the gate. Alfred huffed, holstered the pistol, and started toward the gate.

Grayson saw the fear on Steve's face as he passed. He stared at the dead man on the ground, feeling nothing. He had seen Alfred kill people before, and had seen cokeheads die before, in similar fashion. "What do you want to do with the corpse?" he asked.

Alfred shrugged. "Feed it to the dogs, I suppose," he said. "Or leave it there. Hardly matters to me."


	2. Interlude 1: Steve Burnside

Processing was a tiny office in the back of the compound. Steve stood in a line of prisoners, and the guards took their prints, assigned their prisoner IDs, and patted them down for contraband. One of the guards had found the dime-bag of weed Steve had on him, then pocketed it and told him to get his uniform. The uniform was gray and ratty-looking, and had his prisoner ID stamped on the back. The guards said he could keep his pants and boots, but they had taken the laces ("One guy went and choked himself dead with his laces," the guard had said, smiling around a mouthful of chewing tobacco. "You ain't getting out of this the easy way, kid"). Then they were herded into the prisoner barracks, which smelled of dog shit and stale sweat.

The soldiers had taken his father away to another barrack, on the far side of the compound. The barrack he had been assigned to was a long single-floor building. The bunks were stained with dark colors, and Steve couldn't decide if it had been shit, or someone's blood. A naked bulb hung from the ceiling on a thin rusty chain, and one of the prisoners informed him that it didn't work. Further down, past the bunks, were the showers; the tiling was cracked, or pieces of it were missing, and only two of the four showers worked, so prisoners had to double-up or wait, and were only allotted ten minutes to bathe ("The Warden Alfred? Yeah, that guy's an asshole," said one of the prisoners, a man who had simply called himself Bob. "I used to work for him. He does that ten-minute shit so he don't have shell out extra cash for the water bill when it comes, the cheap fucker").

Steve settled into his bunk. The prison guards had taken all of his personal items, including the wristwatch his dad had bought him. The only thing they were allowed to keep was a notebook, which was provided for them. Steve reasoned that the Warden got off on reading about other people's misery, and that was why he let them have notebooks.

Bob had bummed a cigarette from one of the friendlier guards, an older guy named Williams. He occupied the bunk opposite Steve. Bob had once worked for Alfred Ashford, as some kind of secretary, and there had been some falling out, though Bob never went into the details. Bob looked like an anorexic sitcom dad from the early 90s. His skin was sun-browned, his hair was greasy, and the bones in his face were starting to show, and gave the impression of a human skull paper-mached by brown bag paper.

"Things are easy the first day," said Bob, around the cigarette. "Guards let you settle in. But tomorrow, you're gonna be up at the ass-crack of dawn with the rest of us."

"Why the hell you in here then?" asked Steve.

Bob showed him his foot, which was wrapped in a dirty blood-stained bandage. "Hurt my foot," he said. "Well, hurt it myself. Stabbed it with the shovel and said it was an accident. Lost some toes. Been healing up. But I'll be out there again." He looked absolutely miserable at the thought. Fat beads of olive oil sweat dripped down his nose and beaded on his upper-lip.

Steve frowned and said, "The Warden. What's his deal, man? He shot some guy 'cause the dude joked about his sister."

Bob shook his head. "He's fucking crazy," he said. "How I got here in the first place. I asked about Alexia. You never ask the Warden 'bout Alexia, kid. Your buddy made the fatal mistake." He finished his cigarette and put it out on his palm. His palm was calloused to the point it no longer resembled human skin. Steve wondered if it had hurt to put the cigarette out like that, but decided it probably hadn't.

"Alexia's his sister, I'm guessing?" said Steve, wiping his forehead on his arm. "Why's he so touchy?" He was drenched in sweat from the oppressive jungle-heat of the climate, and the heat of all the bodies in the room. He took his shirt off, but felt no relief.

"There's a lot of rumors surrounding Alfred and Alexia," said Bob, picking at a thick black scab on his arm with a dirty fingernail. "Guards like to gossip, see. Alexia died back in '83, and others are saying she's alive, and the two of them are up in their private mansion humping. Fucking European nobles, kid. Bunch of fucking inbreds. You ever read about how all the European royals are related in some way, 'cause they fuck each other?"

Steve shook his head.

"Well anyway, they say Alexia's supposed to be fucking gorgeous," Bob continued. "Way some folk describe her, she'd put all the women in Hollywood out of business. I saw her once on television, way back in the 1980s. She was a pretty little girl, sure thing. Didn't know it was her until Williams told me, when I'd brought it up."

"Who was that big guy with Alfred? The dude in the black suit. Didn't look military."

Bob scratched his head with the urgency of someone suffering from a severe lice infection. Then he said, "Oh, that's Grayson Harman. Guy's pretty much a ghost, but sometimes he comes down into the compound with Alfred. He's the Ashford's butler. So Williams tells me, and Williams ought to be telling the truth 'cause the old bastard's been around this prison for years, Harman was good friends with Alexia when they were kids."

"Alfred doesn't wig on the guy when he talks about Alexia?" asked Steve, finding himself curious of the mythology behind the man in black.

"Williams says Harman and Alexia were childhood sweethearts," said Bob. "Crazy fucker, if you ask me. You don't stick your cock in a woman with a crazy brother, kid. Philosophy to live by." One of the prisoners told Bob to shut the fuck up, but Bob ignored him, as if he was accustomed to being told to shut the fuck up, and no longer cared whether people liked to hear him talk or not. "But no, far as I know, Harman's the only guy Alfred likes even a little bit." He held his thumb and finger slightly apart to indicate _little_. Steve noticed he was missing the tip of his thumb. "I don't like Harman," he added. "He's not Alfred's brand of crazy, but he's definitely borderline psycho. You gotta be somewhat of a psycho to be friendly with a family like the Ashfords, or to even entertain the idea of wanting to fuck Alexia Ashford."

"Wouldn't mind fucking Alexia, if half the descriptions of her are true," said one of the prisoners, who had been eavesdropping on their conversation and was lying naked in his bunk, his skin slick with sweat. "Hear she's a blonde, like the Swedish model type, with long legs and nice tits."

"Why don't you shut the fuck up, Cal, and wank someplace else?" said Bob, and he shook his head with an annoyed look. "Don't mind Cal," he said to Steve. "Guy's desperate for some female company. I guess we all are, to varying degrees. Unless you subscribe to men, in which case, there's plenty to be had." He leaned toward Steve and said, with particular gravity, "Watch yourself in the showers, kid."

Steve swallowed the lump in his throat and nodded. "Right," he said.

Bob was gone by the morning. When he asked one of his bunkmates about it, they said the guards had taken Bob away during the night, and informed Steve it was a pretty common occurrence, and that he should watch himself. The guards marched them into the mess hall, which consisted of two wooden picnic tables. Steve sat down for breakfast: a bowl of watery prison oatmeal, a small bottle of orange juice, and an apple. He ate without enthusiasm. Then they were herded out into the compound, where his task for the day was to repair the roof of one of the barracks which, one of his groupmates explained, had been damaged in a recent tropical storm.

Steve was jimmying one of the ruined shingles loose when he said to Angel, a convict who had once worked for Umbrella and was serving time for embezzlement, "I shouldn't even be here, man. It was my old man who fucked up." He slid the shingle out. The sun was fully out now, beating down on his back. He could feel his skin blistering under his shirt. "I just got caught up in this shit."

"Yeah, you and everyone else," said Angel, nailing down the new shingle. Angel was a person of ambiguous race. He had a smooth brown face, green eyes, and a shaved head. "Who's your dad? Maybe I know him."

"David Burnside," said Steve, jimmying another shingle loose with the flat bar.

"Nah, don't know him. What did he do?"

"Stole from Umbrella."

Angel whistled, fishing nails from the bucket and nailing down another shingle. He smacked the nail once with his hammer, then a second time, with two loud thumps. "Yeah, I learned the hard way not to fuck with Umbrella," he said. "Rockfort is the last place you want to be, my friend. Ass-end of nowhere, and it's run by a guy who would give the Joker a run for his money."

"You a Batman fan, Angel?"

"Yeah," said Angel. "I was. But I figure I'll never see another Batman movie, or read another Batman comic, so what's the point of staying a fan? Just makes me remember better times, and then I get angry."

"You know anything about the Warden?" asked Steve, shifting the subject, hammering down a new shingle. "Bob told me a few things. But you used to work for Umbrella." He kept his voice low so the guard watching them couldn't hear. Sweat dripped from his face, and his throat was dry. Every breath came like a cloud of dust.

"Alfred?" said Angel, and he shook his head. "Not much. Most as anyone does on the low rungs of the Umbrella ladder. He's from England, from some rich fucking family. Really paranoid guy. Only talks to his pet butler."

That was the second time someone had brought up Grayson, the Ashford's butler. Steve wondered if the guy had some sort of reputation he hadn't learned of yet, like maybe he was some kind of Dr. Mengele, and he had been the one who had taken Bob. "Is there something I should know about the butler?"

"Nah. Guy's rarely seen. And he never talks to anyone," said Angel, loosing the old nails from another shingle with the flat bar they shared and replacing them with new ones from the bucket. "Guy's like a shadow. He's there, but he's not. He gives me the creeps, man. I'm pretty sure Harman's crazy, but he's the dangerous kind of quiet-crazy that's always on an uncertain brink of explosion, as if his flesh is an overstuffed bag, and it's barely holding in the contents of his madness. At least with Alfred, you know he's crazy. You know what to expect when Alfred walks into a room. But Harman? He might tell you a knock-knock joke, or he might beat you to death, or he might not do anything at all."

They were given thirty minutes at noon for lunch, which was every bit as unappetizing as breakfast, and then they were sent back to work. It was dark by the time the guards had sounded the horn, and they were packed back into the barracks. Most of his bunkmates went to bed, or they lingered in the mess hall playing cards, or leafing through ancient issues of _Sports Illustrated_ and _Newsweek_. Steve waited for his turn in the shower. _Watch yourself in the shower_ , something with Bob's voice said. Nobody bothered him. He showered without shampoo and cleaned himself with a mostly-gone bar of soap. Every part of his body ached. Once his ten minutes were up, he quickly dressed and went to bed, falling asleep almost instantly despite the mosquitoes sucking on his skin, and the night-heat, and the knowledge that tomorrow would be even worse.


	3. Part One - A Friendly Conversation

Grayson drank Alfred's cognac while Alfred talked to himself, dressed in a purple silk dress he thought Alexia would have worn, the unopened bottle of anti-psychotics on his vanity. Anita O'Day was singing _Good-Bye_ on the record player. As Alfred talked to himself, slowly swaying to the music, he alternated between his voice, and a voice that might have been Alexia's. The whole scene made Grayson think of Silence of the Lambs, when Buffalo Bill had danced to _Good-Bye Horses_.

He had become so accustomed to Alfred's cross-dressing schizo-habit that it barely struck him as abnormal anymore. At first, it had been difficult, not because he was some kind of homophobe, but because the drag-show had dredged up painful boyhood memories. Grayson had never truly reconciled with Alexia's death; and in those clothes, Alfred looked like her, or what Grayson imagined she would have looked like at twenty-seven. Even so, Alfred couldn't entirely disguise the fact that he was a man. His shoulders were too broad, his hips too narrow and mannish.

Grayson drank. Whereas Alfred had escaped into some lucid sub-reality where Alexia was alive, Grayson had escaped into alcohol. It hadn't been too bad at first, a little drink here and there to cope with Alexia's death; after all, he had loved her. Then, as the years steadily went by, the habit had morphed into an _idée fixe_ , and he found himself almost perpetually shitfaced, and would wake up with no recollection of the night before, an empty bottle or two on the carpet beside his bed.

"Don't you think so, Grayson?" said Alfred, in the approximation of Alexia's adult voice.

He hadn't been listening. "Sure," said Grayson amiably, and knocked back more of the cognac, tasting spices, and a vague buttery under-flavor of toffee.

"Would you please drink out of a bloody glass?"

Grayson got a glass, but didn't pour anything into it.

"You're such a pig," said Alfred. "You weren't even listening to my brother and I, were you?"

"No, I wasn't. Sorry, Alexia." As much as he wanted to, Grayson knew it was a bad idea to dispel Alfred's elaborate cabaret too prematurely, because Alfred could get violent. Grayson called it the cold-water effect. When someone is sleeping and won't get up, you throw cold water on them, and they wake up, startled, confused, and angry. That was Alfred's psychotic condition. It was throwing cold water onto someone who was sleeping very deeply. "What were we talking about?"

Alfred said, in Alfred's English falsetto, "We were discussing a potential trip to England in a few weeks. You had mentioned once you had family there, yes? In Dover, I think it was."

"I don't know them," said Grayson. "I just know _of_ them. Why are we going to England?"

"Umbrella business," said Alfred, in Alexia's voice.

"Right."

"You really should stop drinking," chided Alfred, still speaking like Alexia.

 _I don't want to stop_ , Grayson thought. His thoughts were becoming nebulous concepts, and the room had started to swim in a way that made Grayson think of a kaleidoscope. It was time to turn in, he decided, getting up, wobbling on his feet. "I'm fine, Alexia," he lied, dragging himself to the door. "I'm going to my room. Good night." He heard Alfred say _you're absolutely shitfaced_ , and then Grayson was out the door, and out of earshot.

He slept without dreaming.

When Grayson woke, his head felt like a soft fruit being pared, slowly, with a rusty knife. Alfred was inside his room, dressed in his military formals: a red soldier's dress jacket with gold embroidery on the cuffs and pockets, a white cotton undershirt, and white pants. He wore a leather shoulder sling for his rifle, and smelled of expensive cologne.

Alfred fixed a glass of bitters and seltzer, then handed the glass to Grayson and said, "I knew you would have a monstrous hangover, so I took it upon myself to fix you up. Drink." Alfred seemed to have no recollection of last night, which hopefully meant he'd taken his meds. He was Alfred again, and Alfred knew Alexia was dead.

"I didn't know you cared, Alfred," said Grayson, and downed the drink.

"I don't. What I care about is you being fit enough for work." Alfred slapped Grayson across the back of his head. Then, testily, "I won't have you lying about like a vagabond. You work to earn your keep, Harman."

"Okay, yeah. I get it," said Grayson, rubbing his head, where Alfred had struck him. He stood. His leg had a painful kink in it. _Fucking Charley horse_. He rubbed it, limping past Alfred toward the door. "I just need to get a shower."

"Do that," said Alfred. "When you're finished, we're taking a trip down to the compound. I have to meet with someone about a shipment."

"Why do you need me to come? I have work to do here."

"You're coming with me because you're my servant, and you do as I say," said Alfred, in an angry dad voice that said: _my house, my rules_. "Go get your bloody shower, Harman. My meeting is in an hour."

The meeting was down in the Palace, in the conference room. The receptionist Martin, a large man with a receding hairline, was talking to someone on the phone at the front desk. He mouthed hello, then admitted them through the doors. A man in black fatigues and Kevlar waited for them inside. His helmet looked like a gas mask with plastic red lenses, which gave the very specific impression of a fly. Grayson knew who the man was. His name was simply HUNK, a special agent who had trained on Rockfort, and was known as Mr. Death, or the Grim Reaper, among the Umbrella brass. Personally, Grayson preferred Joe Black, but Alfred hadn't been keen on the idea when he had suggested it.

"Where is my shipment, Hunk?" Alfred demanded, frowning. "It was supposed to be here."

"You wouldn't tell us what was in the container," said HUNK, his voice coming through his mask like a bad radio signal. "It's a safety risk. I'm not sending my men to Antarctica until you tell us what's in that crate. We need to know what we're up against, should things go south, as things often do." The inflection of his approximated voice never changed; Grayson couldn't decide if it was because of the mask, or because HUNK spoke as if he genuinely didn't give a shit about anything.

"It's none of your business what's in the container, Hunk," said Alfred, and it almost sounded as if he wasn't even sure of what was in the container. "You're paid to do a job, not to ask questions."

"This asshole routine might work on the grunts and the prisoners, but it doesn't work on me, Warden," said HUNK, in that same inflectionless radio-voice. "You want to waste my time, that's fine. That's your prerogative. But I'm a busy man." HUNK started toward the door. "I'm not taking the job," he added, and left.

"I hate him," said Alfred, grinding his teeth.

"Hunk's a professional, Alfred. A highly desired professional. And highly desired professionals work on their own terms," said Grayson, and slapped Alfred on the back. "Don't worry, champ. What was in the container anyway?"

"Touch me again, and I will break every one of your fingers, Grayson, and I will do it as slowly as possible."

"No, you won't. So what was in the box?"

Alfred muttered something to himself that might have been _miscreant_ or _I can't_. Then he said, "As for the container, it's none of your business either."

"Was it a head?"

"What?"

"You've never seen Seven? The infamous _what's in the box_ scene? Come on, man, Pitts' line-delivery was gold: What's in the _baaaaawks_? _What's in the fucking baaaaawks_?" No recognition on Alfred's face. Grayson shook his head, disappointed. He made a mental note to make Alfred watch the movie later. Then said, because he knew Alfred too well, "You don't even know what's in the box, do you?"

Alfred never told him what was in the box.

They headed back to the mansion. As they were passing through the compound, Grayson saw Steve. The prisoners were repairing a wall that had been hit during the last big tropical storm. Steve was carting a wheelbarrow heaped with brick debris, shirtless, his flesh drenched in oily sweat. When Steve saw Grayson, he gave him a look. There had been something hesitant, maybe even fearful, in his stare.

Back at the mansion, Grayson made Alfred watch Seven, and as it turned out, Alfred had really liked it, and commended Spacey's performance as John Doe. Grayson felt a degree of pride; it had been his mission to convert Alfred into a film junky, just as Grayson had with Alexia when they were kids, when they had spent nights watching VHS tapes of everything from _Sleepaway Camp_ to _Blade Runner_.

He needed fresh air. He went out onto the balcony where his father had often sat, when Grayson had been a boy. There were two wicker chairs. Between them sat a low table of polished Vietnamese rosewood, decorated with a single porcelain vase of white lilies. The lilies had been his father's idea; Grayson had maintained the tradition, and had discovered he actually liked to garden when he wasn't shitfaced.

It was dark now, and the air was cool, smelled of brine, and of flowers. Grayson poured himself a whiskey and drank, then lit a cigarette with his father's silver flip-lighter, which, he'd been told, had been a gift from Edward Ashford.

Alfred appeared like a ghost. He was dressed in all white, which only heightened the effect of ghostliness. It was the sort of Caribbean uniform that seemed ubiquitous among rich white guys who lived on islands. "You're already getting drunk?" he asked, and shook his head, sitting down in the other wicker chair. "This is ridiculous, Harman. I should fire you."

"But you won't," said Grayson, downing a second whiskey. He took a long drag on his cigarette, then blew smoke, watching it disperse. "You need me, and you know it." He poured himself another glass, then a second, which he offered to Alfred.

Alfred took the drink and sipped it. "Thank you." He looked deeply contemplative. Then asked, "You miss her, don't you?" It was less of a question, and more of a statement, and it took Grayson by surprise. Alfred and him had a complicated love-hate friendship. They were like Felix and Oscar from the Odd Couple, but decidedly more dysfunctional.

"Yeah," said Grayson, finishing his cigarette and starting on another whiskey. "I do."

"Even though you had dated that one woman," said Alfred, bitterly.

"Jill? Who cares. It was years ago, Alfred." Grayson was on his fourth or maybe fifth drink, and was feeling nice now, as though his anxiety had blown off like the outer layers of a supernova, and its anxiety-dust had, in similar fashion to the Big Bang, created neurogalaxies of new, pleasant feelings he hadn't known before. "Raccoon City's just a memory now," he said, casually. "Government wiped it from the map, and probably Jill too. Besides, I never loved her. I loved Alexia. I still love Alexia, even if she's dead. Makes me think of that fucking Titanic movie. That fucking Celine Dion song."

"My Heart Will Go On?"

"Yeah," said Grayson, and drank. He went to pour another drink, but the bottle was basically empty. Grayson frowned, sad that the whiskey was gone, sad because he still loved a dead woman, and sad because he had a bunch of sad songs on his mind. And those songs were the soundtrack of his memories now, which came on like a bad 1980s romantic film montage. "That one. Or maybe it's like that one Whitney Houston song."

"I Will Always Love You? You're bloody odd when you're drunk, Grayson. You think about the stupidest things." Alfred had barely touched his whiskey. Then again, Alfred had always been one of those people who took forever to drink their alcohol. They could spend three hours in a bar, and Alfred wouldn't have finished his first drink until they were about to leave.

"Yeah. From that one shitty movie she did with Costner." Grayson shrugged, then said, "When you're drunk, all you can think about is stupid things. Idle too long, and your minds starts slipping into darker places, man. It's like you're running, and you're running on ice, and the ice is cracking underneath you. Do you just stand there and drop into the water? No, you keep running." He wasn't even making sense to himself. Grayson furrowed his brow and shook his head, searching for a better analogy. "It's kind of like performing an exorcism, I guess," he said. "Good thoughts are the droplets of holy water you sprinkle on the bad thoughts."

"You're sounding more and more ludicrous," said Alfred, and laughed. He finally took another sip of his whiskey. "I don't know what Alexia ever saw in you, Harman."

"Rugged good looks? Great personality?"

"You're an asshole."

"I know," said Grayson.

"You are _always_ an asshole," said Alfred.

"That's why you keep me around, buddy. For entertainment value."


	4. Interlude 2: Newcomer

Every part of him ached. His skin had browned in the sun, and had bubbled and started to peel in some places, where the sunburn had been particularly severe. He tried to lay on his side, but it didn't help. Then he tried lying facedown, but found that didn't alleviate the pain either. Eventually, he just stopped trying to get comfortable, resigning to the fact that there was no comfort to be had in his present condition.

His stomach growled. Since he had been brought to Rockfort, he had lost several pounds, and felt like a ghost of himself, a thing that only half-existed and was starving. The prison only fed them the basics, just enough to keep them working until their bodies gave out on their own. He had watched one of his bunkmates die from exhaustion. His bunkmate, a man named Nate, had been mortaring bricks, then had suddenly dropped to the ground, dead. The guards and the other prisoners had just ignored Nate, and when Steve had gone to help him, the guards had beaten him down into the dirt beside old Nate and had told him to get back to work. Steve wondered if this was what his grandfather had felt like when he had been locked up in Buchenwald.

Steve closed his eyes and remembered something his grandfather had said once: _The Americans came, and we were liberated_. He wondered if anyone would come and liberate them.

His bunkmate Charlie was talking to a man Steve only tangentially knew, a prisoner named John who had been incarcerated for larceny. As John told it, he had been Bob's successor as Alfred's secretary, and had gotten caught trying to steal a pair of golden lugers from Alfred.

"I hear there's another prisoner coming," Charlie was saying to John. "Some chick. They're taking her to the women's compound. Damn shame. Wish they'd send her here."

"What'd she do? Old Man mention anything?" asked John. Old Man was another one of Williams monikers. He was everyone's connection to the goings-on around Rockfort, and their connection for cigarettes and booze, and the other things Alfred didn't precisely punish them for having, but didn't go out of his way to provide.

"Something about theft," said Charlie. "Girl broke into Umbrella's Paris facility, but that's all Old Man Williams said."

"Damn," said John. Then, "Oh, Williams still bringing us that wine? Christmas in a few weeks."

"I'll talk to him about it," said Charlie. "Maybe he can swipe a bottle from the Warden."

Steve kept out of their conversation. If Williams was planning to steal anything from Alfred, Steve didn't want to be involved. Some small stupid part of his brain reasoned that, if he stayed on his best behavior and kept his head down, maybe Alfred would cut him some slack for being such a model prisoner.

His skin felt as if a thousand little insects were crawling over it, or perhaps that his skin had come alive, and it was skittering over his bones like a colony of ants. He got up. He was tired, but couldn't sleep. He wanted to walk outside, but the guards didn't let them leave the barracks at night. Climbing down from his bunk, Steve went into the mess hall. There was a section that was caged off by chainlink, where the watch-guard worked, and would, at night, watch porn on a shaky internet connection. Steve only knew the connection was shaky because, between moans and grunts, the sound would catch, and then the guard would loudly complain about buffering and shit internet with his cock outside his pants. It had gotten to the point that the guard didn't even try to hide his porn addiction anymore, and somehow, Steve didn't think his bunkmates minded. They were always talking about women and wanting to fuck women, and he guessed that was why they were okay with it; it provided a good soundtrack for their imaginations.

A woman's moaning came from the guard-cage. Two of his bunkmates were in the mess hall, flipping through an issue of _Sports Illustrated_ from the summer of ten years ago, and Steve knew from the way their backs were turned, and how their hands were moving, that both dudes were jerking off without shame.

Steve walked back into the bunks and crawled back into his. He thought about this girl Claire, and felt bad that someone else had to come here and suffer. Then he fell into an uneasy sleep.


	5. Interlude 3: Claire Redfield

They took the bag off her head and brought her to processing. The office was tiny and filled with a blue haze of cigarette smoke. Guards in military fatigues sat at worn aluminum desks, behind computers, and they wore the sort of hangdog expressions endemic to extremely overworked people. There were male prisoners in the office; Claire prepared herself for the cat-calls and the hoots, but nothing happened. It was almost as if the prisoners were too scared to talk, or make eye contact, or do anything but breathe.

She was brought to a soldier. He looked no older than fifty, and wore steel wire-frame glasses. The man stamped the paper her escort had handed him, assigned her a prisoner ID, then waved them to the side, where her escort patted her down for contraband. The guard found nothing, however, and his hand lingered longer than it needed to on her inner-thigh. He grinned in her periphery with long nicotine-stained teeth, then brought her to a window, where the quartermaster waited behind a square of chainlink. He slid a folded prison uniform through the slot, and Claire was taken away to a holding cell. There were two other women in there, sitting on a worn wooden bench, which was patinaed with tallies, and crude prison hieroglyphs of desperate final messages and porn.

The holding cell was in some sort of concrete substructure, and there was a single desk beyond the prison bars, where a harassed-looking Hispanic soldier sat, his brown face illuminated by the incandescent glow of the shaded desk-lamp.

"Are we allowed to talk?" asked Claire, staring at the man beyond the bars.

"Doesn't matter to me," said the man gruffly. He was flipping through a paperback of _The Firm_ by John Grisham. "Probably going to be in there for a few hours. They're making room in the women's compound."

They way he said _making room_ made Claire uneasy, but she said nothing. She knew enough about Umbrella to know what the man had meant. She turned to the other women in the cell and sat down, feeling the concrete rough and cool through the thin denim of her jeans. She ignored her prison uniform. "What are you both here for?" she asked conversationally, glancing between them. One of the women was a middle-aged brunette in a suit, and the other was a strawberry blonde who might have been a few years older than Claire.

"I was a researcher with Umbrella," said the woman in the suit. She looked as if she had been crying.

"I cleaned. The Warden didn't like the job I did," said the strawberry blonde, and she shrugged. "What are you here for?"

"I broke into Umbrella's Paris laboratory," said Claire, as if it was the most normal thing in the world to say.

The woman in the suit spoke. "I heard about that from a colleague. You know, before I came here. I just arrived yesterday. I've sat in this cell since." She stared at the space in front of her eyes, and looked completely beaten. Her expression made Claire think of this documentary she had seen about battered women. She had that look, a battered woman look. "Why did you do it?" she asked, barely loud enough for Claire to hear. "You look too young."

"I was looking for my brother," said Claire. She figured telling the woman didn't matter now; the woman was a prisoner too. "He disappeared after the Raccoon Incident," she added.

"I remember that," said the strawberry blonde.

"Is there anything you can tell me about this place?" asked Claire, looking around. There were rusty pipes snaking along the walls and ceiling, and years of prison scratch-graffiti on the walls. She saw dark stains there too, and imagined someone had just kept scratching at the walls until their fingers were bloody.

"Not really. I didn't work here," said the woman in the suit, and she shook her head.

"I can tell you," said the strawberry blonde. "Don't piss off the Warden. His name's Alfred Ashford. And stay away from his butler if you see him."

"Something wrong with the butler?" asked Claire.

"He gives me the creeps," said the strawberry blonde. "Real Hannibal Lecter vibes."

A phone rang. The soldier answered it and spoke quietly to someone on the other line. Then he got up and opened the cell door with a rusty squeal. "Let's go," he said, and he grabbed the two women by the arms with all the unnecessary roughness of a cop on a power-trip. The woman in the suit started to cry again, and then they were pushed from the holding cell, and out of sight.

Claire was alone now, listening to things skittering in the darkness, and the steady drip of water.


	6. Part One - A Chance Meeting

Grayson hadn't been able to shake the feeling that something very bad was about to happen. Alfred had mentioned something like that earlier, and now, it was slowly creeping over him.

He weeded the garden, pausing a moment to wipe the sweat from his face with his arm. It was another hot day, though the storms would hit in the evening, so he had taken the time to work outside in the garden before the rain rolled in. He loosened the soil around the heliotropes, sweet williams, nicotiana, and the sweet alyssums, then put down some fresh compost and hose-watered the plants. Grayson repeated the process in the other flower-beds. Once he'd finished, his hands were black with dirt, and his clothes were soaked with sweat.

Grayson saw Alfred coming up the flagstone path, from the direction of the prison compound. He was dressed in his military formals. "We caught a spy," announced Alfred, and he was grinning. "Little sneak was caught snooping around the Paris facility. I pulled up her file. Her name is Claire Redfield. She was processed this morning."

"That's nice, Alfred." Grayson handed Alfred a glass filled with iced tea, and said, "Made it earlier. Iced black tea with orange peel and lemongrass."

Alfred stared at the glass as if it was a highly sensitive explosive. "I never understood the American fascination of drinking cold tea." He shook his head, but sipped it anyway, licking his lips. Then he said, noncommittally, "Not too shabby, I suppose," and handed the glass back to Grayson. "Get a shower and make some proper tea."

Grayson showered, dressed in his black Burberry suit, and put the kettle on. It was dark outside, and the rain and thunder had started. When Grayson entered the parlor with the tea, the Ink Spots were crooning _I Get the Blues When It Rains_ from an antique record player. Grayson set the tray on the coffee table and dished out the spread of milk, sugar, and teacakes. He sat opposite Alfred. He had made himself a coffee; he had never really liked hot tea.

Grayson sipped his coffee. He took it black, a preference which had driven Alexia crazy when they had been kids. "You know that bad feeling you'd mentioned, Alfred?" he said, frowning. "I have it too."

Alfred stirred milk and sugar into his tea, then sipped. He sat cross-legged in a large upholstered wingback armchair, and in his military clothes, Alfred looked, Grayson decided, like an early Victorian portrait of some austere English officer who had just returned from Waterloo."I still feel it," said Alfred. "You know that feeling one gets when watching a horror film, and one is sure something is about to pop out? It's sort of like that, I suppose. A waiting."

Grayson nodded, then finished his coffee. He knew exactly what Alfred meant. Faintly, Grayson heard thunder but, after a moment, realized it wasn't thunder. It was the roar of several jet engines, and the planes were flying low.

A siren wailed. Alfred grabbed his rifle and ran from the house, and Grayson followed. The dark fuselage of a jet flew low, toward the compound, and dropped a spray of bombs on the prison. Black smoke mushroomed from the ferroconcrete ruins. There were gunshots, the sounds of people dying, and the loud wails of something that definitely wasn't human. The wind carried a smell of blood, and of gasoline and, Grayson imagined, of fear.

They ran downhill, over the wooden bridge that connected to the Palace. Grayson slapped the hidden switch on the wall molding, and they emerged in Alfred's office. The office looked like the office of any important person. A large cherry-wood desk sat in front of a large panoramic window that overlooked a cliff-side that sloped into the sea. The bookcases here were filled with leather-bound books on law, philosophy, and military. Law and philosophy had never been interests of Alfred's, but the military books were well-worn, with dog-eared pages and thumb-smudged spines.

Alfred punched a code into his computer. The custom Swiss clock, which hid the passage to the mansion, thumped back into place. He sat down at his desk and took the phone off its cradle, dialing an extension. Grayson could tell nobody had picked up, because Alfred slammed the phone back on its cradle, cursed, then tried to pull up the security feeds on his computer. The cameras had been disconnected from the server.

"Had to have been a bloody inside-job. Someone was helping them," said Alfred, and he shook his head, getting up.

"Whoever they are, they're probably dead now," said Grayson.

They cut through his secretary's office, which looked similar to Alfred's office, but much smaller. It looked, Grayson decided, like the sort of office that might belong to a stodgy headmaster. The Aztec bookcases were stuffed with more leather-bound law books, spiral-bind technical manuals, and a few books on Latin and grammar. A permanent cigar-fug lingered in the air.

They left the office and entered the foyer of the Palace, which was empty. Long lengths of print-outs, manila folders, and other papers littered the checkered marble floor. Grayson guessed the staff had bolted when they'd heard the bombs.

Something moved below. Alfred leaned over the balustrade, peering through his rifle-scope. Grayson saw Martin running and panting toward the door, a thin red laser grazing along the tile, tracking him, the red dot trembling on the back of Martin's head. Alfred pulled the trigger, and Martin dropped, part of his head spraying the tile, his doughy body seemingly deflating.

"Why did you shoot Martin?" asked Grayson. He didn't actually care Alfred had murdered Martin. He just wanted to know why Alfred had.

"He could have been the leak," said Alfred, in typical paranoid fashion. Though there was definitely a hint of delight in Alfred's voice, as if he'd enjoyed killing Martin. And Grayson knew he had enjoyed it. Death was an integral component of Alfred's personal ecosystem; if the death was taken away, his entire ecosystem would collapse, in the same fashion the ocean ecosystem would collapse if all the plankton died. "I never liked him anyway," he added.

"How do you know I wasn't the leak?"

Alfred stared at him, like he'd just told him two plus two equaled twenty-two. "You're always with me," he said. "I would know if it was you, Harman."

"Fair enough," said Grayson.

"Someone's coming, Harman."

The door opened. A girl walked inside. She looked young, probably college-aged. Her hair was reddish brown, and tied back. She wore some kind of leather biker's vest, and worn jeans and boots. She looked like someone who had walked out of a grunge music video, the sort of person who might have patronized The Black Room, back when he'd worked there. Steve was with her. They were talking, though Grayson couldn't really hear what they were talking about. Neither of them flinched when they saw Martin sprawled on the floor.

Alfred's laser-sight moved along the tile again, the red dot quivering between the girl's eyes like a bindi. He shot, but the girl yelled _shit_ and dove behind a pillar, and so did Steve. Alfred muttered something about not having a clear shot now. "Were _you_ behind the attack, Claire?" he cried.

Grayson leaned on the railing and watched the exchange unfold. He was curious to see how things would go, although he doubted Steve or Claire had had anything to do with the attack. The attack had been professional. They were just kids.

"We got caught in the attack, same as you," said Claire. A pause. Then she said, "How do you know my name?"

"I know everything that happens on Rockfort. After all, I am the Warden," said Alfred, and started to laugh like an effeminate lunatic. He peered through his scope. "Alfred Ashford, at your service!" The laser trembled on the pillar, which Claire had peeked out from, beading red in her eye. Claire ducked back into cover, and the bullet missed, chipping the pillar.

"Anyone ever mention you have a weird laugh, Alfred?" said Grayson, conversationally. He had grown bored of the conversation, and was trying to amuse himself at Alfred's expense while he did his whole crazy routine.

"Not now, Grayson," said Alfred.

"I'm just saying."

"And I'm saying you need to bloody shut up." Alfred looked into his scope again. "You're distracting me."


	7. Interlude 4: A Video

They were pinned. Claire couldn't move; if she did move, Alfred would have a clear shot of her, and she would die. She tried to think, but found it difficult between Alfred's taunting, and the present circumstances: the fact she was a sitting duck for a trigger-happy crazy man, and the fact that, beyond the doors of this place, the island was infected with undead.

She peeked around the pillar again, this time on her left, and was almost hit by another bullet. Alfred seemed to be enjoying himself, like the situation was some kind of carnival shooting gallery. He was laughing and talking to the man in the black suit, who Claire could see from where she sat. The man in the black suit was leaning on the balustrade, though he wasn't looking at them, or even looking at Alfred. He was staring at the large portrait of the blonde woman on the wall behind Alfred.

"Who the hell is that, Steve?"

Steve looked. He was ducked beside her. His clothes were torn and muddy, stale with sweat, and his bottom lip was scabbed, where he had split it. "That's Grayson Harman. One of my bunkmates mentioned him," he said, keeping his voice low. The acoustics in the foyer were good, and if they spoke above a certain volume, Alfred could hear every word. "He's the Ashford's butler, or something. Saw him walking the compound with Alfred before. He's a big motherfucker. Can't miss him."

"Why don't you come out and play, Redfield?" came Alfred's voice, from the stairwell.

Claire watched Alfred's laser-sight moving along the wall. She ignored him. Then said to Steve, "Why's he staring at that picture?"

"Same bunkmate said he heard from one of the old prison guards, a guy named Williams, that Grayson was involved with Alexia Ashford," said Steve, and shrugged. "That's Alexia in the picture, I guess."

"I think one of the girls I'd shared a holding cell with mentioned the butler, come to think of it," said Claire. She paused, thinking. An idea occurred to her. Alfred couldn't shoot two people at once; his gun, she had observed, was a bolt-action. But there was the problem of his butler; Claire wasn't sure if he was armed or not. He didn't look it, and anyway, he was too busy staring at Alexia's portrait to notice them make a break for it. She told her plan to Steve.

"Worth a shot." He looked around. Then, "Look. There's a door." Steve pointed at the door on their right, not too far from them. Claire hadn't noticed it before; it had been hidden in the shadows.

"I'll distract Alfred. Run for the door, then cover me," said Claire.

"Got it," said Steve.

Claire stepped from behind the pillar, almost took a bullet to the leg. Steve sprinted for the door. She fired the gun she had taken off a dead prison guard, but hadn't managed to hit Alfred. His butler whipped around, and when Claire fired again, he pushed Alfred into cover, and her bullet pinged off the French railing. Steve leaned out from his cover in the doorway, shot a few bullets at Alfred and his butler. Claire took the opportunity to run.

Steve pulled her into the door and slammed it shut behind them, locking it. "Shit," he said, sweating. "Close one."

The butler or Alfred didn't follow them.

A Rococo-style corridor, lit by small incandescent crystal chandeliers. The floor was checkered marble. A pair of broad double-doors stood their left, and further down, two more doors: one at the end of the hall, and the other in an alcove, out of sight.

They tried all the doors, but only one was unlocked. Gray carpet and walls, with glass displays of guns and military paraphernalia. There were leather couches arranged around a low glass coffee-table, and on that table sat a projector. Magazines, some very old, were stacked on the table in plastic slip-covers. Some of them had art that was unmistakably 1940s: old propaganda pictures from the Second World War, of smiling pin-up girls and nuclear WASP families. There was even some German stuff in there too, but Claire couldn't read it.

The lights suddenly dimmed in the room, like a movie theater.

Old Betacam footage started to play on a projector screen. Two kids were in the video. Claire recognized Alfred, and guessed the girl was his sister Alexia, and they might have been twelve, maybe thirteen. They stood over an ant terrarium. Alfred plucked the wings from a wriggling dragonfly, then fed it to the ants. He was smiling too, and so was his sister, a certain calm sociopathy in their expressions that shouldn't belong to kids. They looked at each other in a way that made Claire's skin crawl, a music box tune tinkling in the background.

"They were gonna fucking kiss," said Steve, making a face. "So that shit about Grayson and Alexia was bullshit. God, Bob was right. European inbreds."

The video suddenly cut off. Another started to play.

Alfred wasn't in this video, and this video actually had sound. It was another boy. The boy had thick, wavy dark hair, and he was taller than Alfred, broader in the shoulders. In stark contrast to the twin's conservative Youth Group wardrobe, the boy wore a bulky denim jacket with white fleece lining, and Jordache jeans. His eyes were the exact shade of a cloudy sky, and he wore a permanent scowl, like the world offended him.

"I think that's Grayson," said Claire.

"I think Alfred finally wandered off," Alexia said on the video, and her voice was slightly fuzzed by the poor sound quality of 1980s camcorders. She moved closer to Grayson, smiling, running her fingers up along his arm. "Rather fortunate, don't you think?"

"We just uncover some child pornography?" said Steve.

Grayson grinned in the goofy way any boy did when a pretty girl paid attention to them. But there was something else about Grayson's expression, in the quality of it, that looked completely out of place on a teenager's face. He looked at Alexia in the way her grandfather looked at her grandmother, who'd been married to him for over fifty years.

Grayson and Alexia talked romantically, too romantically, for kids, and it made Claire uncomfortable that a couple of kids had seemed to know more about love than she did now, at nineteen. Claire couldn't help but notice the look on Alexia's face too, as Grayson and her talked, inching closer and closer, their bodies lit from behind in a nimbus of sunlight. Alexia was every bit as in love with Grayson, and she, like him, did nothing to hide it.


	8. Part One - Waiting Game

"We need to go after them," said Alfred, and he ran downstairs, clutching his rifle like an infantryman running into battle.

Grayson wasn't in a hurry, and made his way downstairs, hands deep in his pockets. He watched Alfred struggling with the lock, then reach for his keyring—Alfred had several, possibly hundreds of keys of different sizes on the ring—and start to sort through them with an annoyed look, muttering expletives under his breath. Grayson leaned on the wall beside the door and said, "We should be worrying about ourselves, Alfred."

"Redfield and Burnside have something to do with this attack." Alfred was still sorting through the keys, growing visibly frustrated because he couldn't locate the key he needed to open that particular door. Eventually, Alfred gave up and chucked the keys at the door. "Fuck," he said. "I knew I should have switched over to computerized locks. One passcode, and I could unlock every bloody door in this building. But no, I was worried about bugs. Technology is trial-and-error, Grayson. What if the thing had malfunctioned, and I couldn't open _any_ of the doors?"

"You keep calling me Grayson," said Grayson, and grinned. Stooping, he scooped up the keys and handed them back to Alfred. "Here," he added.

Alfred snatched the keys and hooked them to his beltloop. Then said, "That is your bloody name, isn't it?"

"You usually call me Harman," said Grayson, amused.

Alfred didn't answer him, abandoning the door and turning around. Something had moved, a wet noise coming from somewhere deeper in the room. Grayson looked, saw a woman staring back at them—one of the female guards, except she looked extremely dead. Her mouth was blood-smeared, eyes foggy with cataracts, which seemed to vibrate with the nameless hunger-frequencies he'd observed in the eyes of junkies hurting for a score. The woman was chewing on Martin, eating pieces of him, tearing bloody strips of his fat and skin away with her teeth.

Sweat beaded on Alfred's forehead. He said, "That isn't what I think it is," and slowly removed the rifle from its shoulder sling.

Grayson said, "That's a zombie."

The woman got up and staggered toward them as if she'd been drinking heavily, moaning, chunks of gelatinous gore-stuff bubbling up from her mouth, dripping down her neck and staining the collar of her sleeveless shirt. She stumbled over her own feet, which she dragged and rolled along the floor, and stretched her thin gray arms, groping at the air.

A red bead trembled between the woman's dead-foggy eyes, and part of her skull dissolved into a cloud of blood. Her body crumpled in a way that made Grayson think of a dead spider. Then Alfred said, "Not only did they attack my island, they _infected_ it."

Grayson almost said he was sure Claire and Steve had had nothing to do with it, but realized there was no point. Once Alfred was convinced of something, it was very hard to convince him he was wrong. Grayson figured it was a by-product of too much Ashford pride; Alfred never liked to be wrong, just as Alexia had never liked to be wrong. "Maybe we should focus on getting off the island, Alfred?" he suggested. "You know how to fly jets, right?"

"That's it," said Alfred, and grinned. "They're going to go to the training facility."

The training facility was where Rockfort's paramilitary received the finer points of their training. It was a large concrete building, and looked more like an elaborate bunker than an actual building. From the little bit Grayson knew about the place, mostly from Alfred, it turned out spec ops groups for Umbrella—specialized guns to go out into the world and keep the company's interests safe and sound from the filthy hands of their competitors in the Global Pharmaceutical Consortium.

They pushed through the creaky wrought-iron gate and loped down a flight of concrete stairs. A ferroconcrete wall and chainlink gate stood on their left, where the prison stored its fuel barrels, and on their right was a sheer mossy cliff-side that sloped sharply into the ocean, which swelled and foamed against the crags. Zombies shuffled through the mud here, dressed in the blood-soaked rags of maintenance coveralls and military fatigues, sloughing wet dead skin, deep raw lesions glittering ruby-like in the sodium glow of the lamps.

Alfred passed Grayson a pistol, which he'd often carried as a back-up when a rifle wasn't practical. It had been the same gun he'd shot the cokehead with at the gates to the prison facility. "Take this," he said. "It's loaded, but you'll need to find more ammunition. It's a standard-issue 9mm. The guards carry the same model."

Grayson took the pistol, said thank you, and stuffed it into the waistband of his pants, the grip slanted across the small of his back. "We can't go through the zombies," he said, looking at the gate on their left. "But we can climb over that."

"Do I look like I can climb?" said Alfred, and his tone said: _I can, but I don't want to_.

"I'll give you a boost," said Grayson. "I can climb."

Alfred looked like he'd just suggested they jump off the cliff. But when Alfred realized the zombies were stumbling toward them, and that they were hungry for fresh people-meat, he said okay, and Grayson helped him up onto the gate. Alfred smoothly swung himself over the fence and dropped, landing on his feet. Grayson started to climb. Something tugged at his pants. He swung his foot back and connected with a head, managing to push himself over the gate, landing hard, driving dull rods of pain through his shins. The zombies banged on the gate behind him.

"Reminds me of the bloody obstacle courses we had to run, back in the military academy," said Alfred, making a face.

"At least you haven't gone too soft from the cushy life you've been living," said Grayson, and laughed.

"I trained as a soldier, Grayson," Alfred pointed out, as if Grayson had just offended him in the worst sort of way. "I graduated at the top of my class, and I _designed_ the bloody training program on Rockfort. The same program, mind you, that HUNK himself graduated from when he'd been moved to spec ops. I'd argue I'm in better shape than you bloody are."

"Fair point," said Grayson, and meant it. Alfred didn't look like much, but he was tough. Grayson was big and pretty built, but clumsy because of his size.

Grayson made his way through piles of rusting barrels stacked like a city skyline. He found a door, though it was locked; it required a military keycard to open. "Move," said Alfred, and swiped his master keycard. The card-reader blipped green, and the door opened.

Inside were old jeeps under green plastic tarps, crates on wooden pallets, toolboxes. A single fluorescent strip lit the space up. Grayson had to watch where he walked. There were car parts strewn across the ground, tools, lengths of grimy bubble-wrap and soggy yellowing newspapers. Alfred led him to a single composite door, which opened into a small concrete maintenance hallway that led into the facility proper.

A tiled hallway with doors that led to what he assumed were offices, behind squares of frosted glass. There were payphones here. Experimentally, Grayson took a phone off its cradle and listened for a beep. Nothing. It was dead. He hung it back up and continued on, noticing a body on the ground. It was a zombie, and had been shot fairly recently. The body was still warm, a gross warm that made Grayson think of undercooked meat.

They heard voices beyond one of the doors here. It was Steve and Claire.

"There's gotta be something on this computer about the airport," Steve was saying. There was a shuffling noise that seemed to come from farther back in the room, like someone was looking through papers.

"I'm not seeing anything in these files," came Claire's voice. "You sure you don't remember where it was?"

"No. Do you?"

Silence.

Then Steve said, "Exactly. They put a bag over my head too."

"Couldn't have been on the base," said Claire. "The airport, I mean. They drove me up here."

"Same. The airport we're looking for was only for sea-planes, for the troops and Umbrella suits," said Steve, and Grayson could hear the _click-clack_ of a keyboard. "That's what that dude said. What was his name? Rodrigo?"

"Yeah," said Claire. "That's his name."

Alfred looked at him and mouthed, _Follow me_.

They turned a corner that led down a small hallway to a door, one of those security deals with corrugated shutters. A keypad was mounted on the wall beside it. He saw Alfred slip the plastic keycard from his back pocket and swipe it through the scan-slot, then thumb-punch a code into the keys.

They went outside and stood in the rainy glow of a halogen light. It was a courtyard of some sort hedged in by chainlink, and beyond that chainlink, the fronds of palm trees and jungle flora shivered in the warm breeze. Metal drums were stacked up against the fence on wooden pallets, each barrel stamped with peeling decals of Umbrella's red and white hexagon. There was a stairwell to their right that ran up along a concrete wall to the second floor of the military facility.

"We can catch the little rats off-guard when they come skittering out the door," said Alfred, as if the plan was an infallibly brilliant one. They climbed the steps.

"Somehow I don't think this is going to work, Alfred," said Grayson.

"You simply need to have more faith in me, Harman," said Alfred, and he checked his scope, making a few adjustments to the lens.


	9. Interlude 5: Albert Wesker

His purpose here hadn't been an infection; that had been an unintended by-product of the bombs. The bombs had blown open one of the old laboratories and had leaked the T-Virus into the prison compound, though that hardly mattered to him, a minor miscalculation. He would still produce results. Alexia Ashford was somewhere on this island. It was only a matter of finding her brother, or her butler Grayson, and making them talk.

He took out the photograph of Grayson, which his inside-man, Williams, had taken a week ago in the compound. Grayson was certainly bigger now. And there was a certain gravity in his expression, a compounded sorrow. If, and it surely would come to it, that Alexia refused to cooperate with him, Wesker could use the butler as leverage. Alfred would be sufficient capital too if things went south with Harman; but there was something delightfully more Shakespearean about hurting Alexia's lover.

One of his men approached him and said, in an approximated electronic voice, "The infection hit critical an hour ago, sir. Whole compound's infected, and the virus is spilling into the outskirts. We lost Echo and most of Charlie company. Alpha is still combing the island for Alexia."

"You still haven't found her?" said Wesker, feeling a twinge of irritation.

"No, sir. We're working on it."

Wesker thrust his hand through the man's chest, clutching his heart. He dropped the still-beating organ and slid his hand from the wet cavity, and watched the soldier slump to the ground, blood pooling underneath him. "Wrong answer."


	10. Interlude 6: Standoff

The moment Claire went out the door, a bullet pinged off the ground near her boot, laser beading in her eye. She dove, clearing the shot, scrambling through the mud into cover, behind a stack of steel drums. Steve crouched beside her, sweating and nervous.

"Come out, come out, little rats," taunted Alfred, from somewhere above. "Don't make me come down there." Claire wasn't worried about Alfred coming anywhere; he was using a scoped rifle, and the higher ground gave him an advantage: a wider view of the area, and the vantage point gave him greater control over the firefight. "You're really no fun, Redfield," said Alfred, and she could hear the pout in his voice. "Neither is Burnside."

"I'll show you fun, once I get up there and kick your girly ass," muttered Steve, and peeked over the drums. His head had nearly been blown away, but he'd ducked back down behind the drums, panting. "Shit," he said.

"Almost had him there, Harman," Claire heard Alfred say. She heard the butler unenthusiastically reply, "That's nice, Alfred", and saw the laser moving along the chainlink opposite her, down across the concrete. "Think I could catch Redfield with a ricochet?"

"That's just stupid, Alfred," she heard the butler say.

"They're both fucking psychos," said Steve, looking at her.

"What the hell did you expect?" Claire tried to get a look at Alfred and the butler, see what they were doing; but was chased back into hiding by a bullet, which had nearly hit her in the head. "Anybody who's fucking normal wouldn't be pals with Alfred. And Alfred wouldn't be pals with anybody who's fucking normal."

"Point," said Steve, nodding. "We gotta run for the steps, Claire. Maybe we can ambush them. You know, like a two-man blitzkrieg."

"If we do," said Claire, "you're gonna have to move fast, Steve. Like your ass is on fire."

Steve nodded again. Claire took a deep breath, then dove for the steps, barely clearing another of Alfred's shots. She scrabbled up the steps on all fours, keeping herself completely hidden behind the concrete handrail on her right. She heard Steve behind her, shooting. When she reached the top, Alfred had gone, but the butler stood there, and he was pointing a gun at her.

Up close, the butler looked younger than Claire had initially thought he was, and he was taller too, seemed to loom. He wore an expensive black suit and shiny oxfords. His eyes were the pale gray of rain clouds, and his dark hair was pomaded, a hairstyle from a gone Hollywood. If he hadn't been pointing a gun at her, Claire might have even thought he was handsome, like a silver-screen leading man.

"Alfred told me to keep you busy," said the butler, but sounded as if the idea bored him.

There was nothing in the man's eyes. There was no madness, no anger, no biases of any kind. He was just a guy following orders, a robot acting on its protocol. "Why don't you shoot me?" asked Claire. "You got me."

"Claire, don't fucking tell the creep to kill you," said Steve, pointing his gun at the butler. "Back off, man," he added, gesturing with the gun: _move_.

The butler stared at Steve with his empty eyes. And it occurred to Claire where she had seen eyes like that before: in those who'd had their ambitions beaten out of them, and in the extremely drunk; Grayson was both of those things. Claire smelled alcohol on him. "You've been drinking, Grayson Harman," said Claire.

"Yep," said Grayson Harman, and drunkenly sniffed. "I guess you heard my name from the inmates. I know they talk." He paused, then waved his gun toward the door on his left. "Alfred wants you to go in there. So go in there."

"Like hell," said Steve.

The butler frowned, and his brow creased as if he had a severe headache, or was trying very hard not to throw up. "Look," he said. "I just work for Alfred. I like Alfred. I do what Alfred tells me to do. And he told me to tell you to go through that fucking door. Okay?"

"Like we're gonna fucking listen to you. It's obviously a trap," said Steve, seemingly braver now because the butler was tanked up. "Fuck you, man."

"This isn't a sandbox game, man," said the butler, still pointing the gun at them. Given his present condition however, Claire wasn't very intimidated by the gun, or by Harman. "This is linear, on rails. Go through the goddamn _fucking_ door, kid."

"What if we want to go through that door?" asked Claire, pointing at the one behind Harman, on his right, which was under a bug-light. Periodically, the light popped as moths and other insects flew into it.

"That one's locked," said the butler. "Alfred won't let me in until you go through the other door."

Claire knew it was a trap, but it wasn't as if they had other options. When they'd left the building, the security shutter had come down behind them, so they could not go back the way they came. "All right," said Claire, and headed for the other door, facing Harman, so he could not shoot her in the back. She put her hands up, in a show of pacifism. "We're going to the other door," she continued. "Just don't shoot, okay?"

"I don't feel like killing you anyway," said the butler, and she watched him swig from a flask with his free hand, the gun still trained on her.

Claire pushed the door open, peeking inside, the reek of rotting meat hitting her nostrils. There was a woman in here, or what remained of her anyway, corpse sprawled on the floor, pink innards flowering from her belly and spilling across the floorboards. Something moved to her left in the darkness, shuffling and moaning. A man dressed in troop fatigues hobbled toward her, stretching out his single arm.

Claire shot the guy in the head. "Clear," she said, and stepped inside. She checked the woman to be safe, and the woman did not move.

Another security shutter, though this one was up. There were two vending machines, a box overflowing with old newspapers and magazines, and a Brazilian snake-plant that had died and wilted a long time ago. An old box-speaker was mounted in the corner of the room, on a small metal framework. Claire tried the buttons on the soda machine, realizing how thirsty she was. Nothing. She kicked it as hard as she could. The machine grumbled, then started spitting cans. She picked up a soda, which was fairly lukewarm, and popped the tab.

"Seriously?" said Steve, behind her.

"I'm thirsty. Get a drink while you can."

Steve did. He had picked up a root beer and complained it was too warm, but drank it anyway.

They checked the area. There were two doors here. One was locked, and the other led to an office. There was a chalkboard in the office with shift rotations written on it. A computer sat on an aluminum desk layered in papers, manila folders, and disposable pens, and someone's nylon windbreaker was still draped over the backrest of the chair. An unfinished game of Solitaire flickered on the computer screen. Sodium light poured through the plastic slats of the windows. Underneath the windows was a worn couch, and a coffee-stained table covered in moldering _National Geographic_ magazines.

She rummaged through a first aid kit bolted to the wall, and pulled something from it: a little plastic white bottle with a pale yellow label.

"What are you doing?" asked Steve, wiping the sweat from his forehead.

"Hemostats," she said. "It's for Rodrigo. He's hurt bad."

"He's probably dead, Claire."

Claire pocketed the medicine and left the room.

"That guy Harman is fucking weird," said Steve suddenly, standing in the glow of the vending machine.

"I can't figure him out," said Claire, folding her arms across her chest. "He's like a hole. I think it's because of Alexia."

"Bunkmate mentioned she died, way back in '83."

"Yeah," said Claire, staring at a faded poster which advertised the Umbrella Corporation, and potential job openings in their PR department. Then she said, "It's kind of romantic, if you exclude the fact he's buddies with a guy like Alfred. I mean, it's fifteen years later, and Harman is still in love with her. Maybe that's why he's a hole."

"Yeah, well. He needs to get over it. I bet the bitch was crazy anyway, like her brother," said Steve. He remembered what Bob had said on his first day as a prisoner: _You don't stick your cock in a woman with a crazy brother, kid_. "Philosophy to live by," said Steve, and when Claire asked him what he was talking about, he told her it was nothing.

The box-speaker crackled above them, and Alfred's voice came through. "I have a little game I want to play, Redfield," he said, giggling like an excited girl. The security shutter rattled down, trapping them in the room. The door on their right, which had previously been locked, opened. "Go through. Don't be shy now. I promise, you'll really _like_ this game."


	11. Part One - The Kill House

Grayson leaned on the computer terminal and yawned, while Alfred watched the monitors. They were in some kind of computer room. He guessed it had been where the security guards had monitored the prison.

"So what's this game you're making them play?" On the monitors, the black and white figures of Claire and Steve moved through an obstacle course cobbled together from wood, sheet metal, and chainlink. It looked a bit like a housing complex, built in warehouse-space. Williams, one of the senior officers, had told him the place had been called the Kill House, and it was where Alfred sent would-be U.S.S recruits to violently showcase their talent.

"Sending them through the obstacle course I designed, of course," said Alfred, with a smug look. "The place is rigged with electrical panels. If they miss a target, they receive a painful electroshock." He started laughing, and he switched on the audio. _Eye of the Tiger_ was playing over the speakers in the Kill House.

Grayson drunkenly laughed. He'd forgotten that Alfred had a sense of humor. He took out his silver flask and swigged, watching as Steve missed a target and was painfully shocked. His body spasmed, and Steve dropped like someone had hung a dumbbell around his neck. Grayson could hear Claire asking if he was okay, and Steve said he was fine, and that Alfred was one sick son-of-a-bitch, and he carried on, riding a wavelength of teenage adrenaline and machismo.

 _Eye of the Tiger_ transitioned to _The Final Countdown_ as Steve and Claire moved through the training maze like confused lab rats trying to puzzle out the mechanisms in a Skinner box. Grayson laughed again, until his sides hurt; everything was funnier, in his current inebriated state. Alfred started laughing too, and they passed the flask back and forth, sometimes commentating on Claire and Steve's performance like a pair of sloppy Attenboroughs.

Steve and Claire had managed to make it to the end of the maze. Claire had suffered a shock after she had missed one of the targets, and Steve had dragged her the rest of the way, until they were safely on the other side of the course. Grayson expected Alfred to be mad that they'd survived, but he didn't seem too upset about it. "Plenty of time to take care of the spies," said Alfred. "They're not going anywhere."

Alfred announced over the speaker that the final part of the game—Grayson did not know what sort of game Alfred was supposed to be playing, but did not really care—would be in the mansion. Alfred navigated the prison through several underground tunnels, allowing them to circumvent the infected. Grayson wondered how deep the tunnels went, and why they were even there. It made him remember something he'd seen in a Vietnam documentary before, about villagers who had dug into the mountains to move their village underground, so they could escape American bombings.

The tunnel eventually led them to the jungle park outside the Ashford mansion, beyond the wrought-iron fence at the foot of the steep, rocky hill the house sat on. Most of the gardeners had been killed by Alfred in one of his routine paranoid purges, and it had been too large of an area for Grayson to maintain on his own, so he'd abandoned it to the jungle. It was overgrown with weeds and jungle flora, and insects chittered and chirped in the trees. Occasionally, he heard something slithering through the trees, and figured it was probably a snake. Snakes were an issue in these parts, and since Alfred had also killed the pest exterminators, the population had exploded.

They ascended the hill and entered the mansion. Grayson still did not understand what sort of game Alfred had planned for Claire and Steve—to him, it appeared to be a guided sequence of events rather than a game with an actual rule-set—but found himself too drunk to care very much. The mansion was hot and stuffy, and after stumbling around a bit, he located the thermostat and cranked the air-conditioning. Then finished off his flask and helped himself to the good bourbon in the parlor, sagging into a plush wingback armchair, his head feeling heavy.

He must have dozed. Grayson woke to the Ink Spots singing _We Three,_ and a loud bang, like someone had struck the wall with a sledgehammer. It was coming from the foyer. He got up, taking out the gun Alfred had given him and heading toward the noise.

The foyer was decorated like some vampire's bordello, a red arterial scheme of Gothic Victoriana. He saw two figures in the dim gaslight of the place: one was big and dressed in black, and the other was Alfred, and Alfred was pinned against the wall by the figure in black. "Let him go," said Grayson, pointing the gun at the stranger. "Or I'll blow your fucking head open."

The stranger was a tall, built man with coiffed blonde hair. He wore black military fatigues, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and Kevlar, and the sort of black leather gloves Grayson imagined Jack the Ripper might have worn when he'd strangled London's whores. The back of his Kevlar vest, between his shoulders, was labeled H.C.F in fading white decal. The man smiled. It wasn't a friendly smile.

"Grayson Harman. You're certainly a sight for sore eyes," said the man, in a deep purr.

Grayson recognized the man. Albert Wesker.

Wesker dropped Alfred like his interest in him had suddenly evaporated. He moved toward Grayson in a predatory way, like a starving lion closing on a wounded gazelle. "My luck you happen to be here. Though I should have expected as much. You rarely ever left Alexia's side."

Grayson squeezed the trigger—pure mindless reflex—and nothing, no gunshot.

Wesker had practically teleported across the foyer, and he'd torn the gun from Grayson's hand and snapped it in half, like it'd been made of matchsticks. Then Wesker punched him, and his head whipped sideways, pain in his jaw, and pain, like severe whiplash, in his neck. Grayson went down.

"Jesus fucking," he said to himself, and his jaw went numb, until Grayson could barely talk, like he'd just been given a couple shots of Lidocaine.

"Where is Alexia?" said Wesker, in a too-polite voice.

Alfred came up behind Wesker and tried to club him with the butt of his rifle. But Wesker whipped around, yanked the gun from his hands and sent Alfred sprawling clear across the foyer. Alfred crashed into a shelf-display of antique chinaware, where he lay on the marble tile, groaning, jagged pieces of porcelain and splintered wood scattered around him. Wesker threw the rifle aside, and it clattered somewhere in the dark.

"I'm not going to ask again," said Wesker, turning to him. "Where is Alexia, Grayson?"

Grayson watched his reflection in Wesker's sunglasses. "She's dead," he said, drooling, tasting blood in his mouth. Either a tooth had gotten loose, or he'd bitten the inside of his cheek when Wesker had struck him. He was sure his jaw was not broken, which comforted him.

"Don't play coy, Grayson. My patience only stretches so far." Wesker took off his sunglasses. Reptilian eyes stared at him, the irises like rings of fire, the pupils vertical slits. Wesker said, "I know you're trying to protect her."

The Ink Spots and Ella Fitzgerald were singing _Making Believe_ now. The calmness of the song gave a strange sort of juxtaposition to Wesker's angry presence, almost cinematic in its presentation. "She's dead," Grayson repeated. "She died fifteen years ago. It was all over the news. Were you sleeping or something, Albert? Maybe too busy sucking Birkin's dick?"

Wesker punched him again, and it was a lot harder this time. Grayson's head snapped to the side and banged against the wall with a loud visceral noise. Warm blood trickled down the side of his face. "Perhaps I simply have to torture you?" said Wesker, smiling mechanically, eyes disappearing behind the sunglasses. "I wonder how high your tolerance for pain is, Grayson."


	12. Part One - Hello, Old Buddy

Wesker hurled him across the room and shouted, " _Tell me_ where Alexia is."

Grayson tried to right himself in the air, but hit the wall awkwardly instead, knocking some of the pictures from their hooks. He lay on the floor, groaning, his nerves screaming, blood throbbing in his ears.

"I am getting _very impatient_ , Grayson."

"I told you, man. She's dead. Been dead." Grayson tried to stand, but his legs immediately gave out. He lay on the floorboards in excruciating pain. Alfred still lay unconscious a few feet from him, among the porcelain shards and pieces of wood. It took some effort, like a kind of body trick, but Grayson managed to push himself to his feet, wobbling.

"You're dedicated to this charade," said Wesker, lifting Grayson by the throat and roughly pushing him against the wall. Grayson was too weak to fight back. His body was bruised and bloody, and he was tired, and just wanted the fight to end. Wesker seemed to sense this and said, "You don't care if you die. Do you?"

"I don't," said Grayson honestly. He was sure if Wesker kept beating him, his body would eventually give out, and Grayson would not have to care about anything anymore. He liked the idea of nothing mattering anymore, and part of him looked forward to it, while the other, probably the more rational part of him, said it was stupid to think that.

There was a very subtle hint of disappointment in Wesker's expression, as though the fact Grayson wasn't scared had killed his mood, had soured the kill. He heaved him across the foyer. Grayson smashed into a glass case, which had displayed an heirloom estoc.

His brain said to use the estoc against Wesker, but the thing was so old and dull, Grayson doubted it would even cut. Little pieces of glass had gotten stuck in his palm, and he bled on the floorboards. "I love her," he said, because he'd wanted to say that out loud, one more time, before he died.

Wesker pinned him to the floor, incrementally applying pressure to his rib-cage with the thick rubber sole of his boot. "Absolutely pathetic," he said.

 _Ask Anyone Who Knows_ by the Ink Spots played from the record-player in the parlor, and Grayson was glad he at least had that: a good song to die to.

Wesker paused. His boot left Grayson's chest. He answered someone on his earpiece, and sounded agitated, slowly trending toward furious. Then he kicked Grayson so hard that he blacked.

It was 1983, and Alexia was thirteen-years-old, dressed in a white lab coat, and a sober gray dress. They were inside her laboratory, and Alexia was observing ants in several cylindrical glass tanks, scribbling notes on the paper fastened to her clipboard. Fifteen-year-old him could not remember why he'd come here, but knew he'd certainly come for something. Grayson watched the ants scuttling in their tunnels, heard an Erik Satie record playing somewhere, the piano notes omnipresent and ghost-like.

"You've been acting weird lately," said Grayson, watching her. "Like you're constantly on edge, or something. You sick?"

Somewhere, from beyond the dream, adult him remembered this conversation. It had been a conversation he'd had with Alexia, two weeks before she'd died.

Alexia shook her head, put the clipboard down on the table, and hugged him. Alexia did not say anything; she buried her face in his T-shirt, and stayed like that for a long time.

"You sure you're not sick?" he asked, stroking her pale hair.

Alexia shook her head and mumbled into his shirt, "I'm fine." She looked up at him with pale blue eyes, and kissed him like she always kissed him; but there was something different in the quality of it this time, a good-bye feeling.

His adult self knew why Alexia was like that, but his child self was clueless; and the combination of knowing and not knowing was frustrating, because it made him feel as though he could change the past right there, if only he could whisper what he knew—that Alexia would die—to his fifteen-year-old self.

"I know that look," he said, brushing a thumb across her pale cheek.

"It's exhaustion. I've been working a great deal," said Alexia, and smiled. It was a convincing smile, the kind of smile only a practiced liar could legitimize.

 _Liar_ , his adult self thought. _You're going to infect yourself_ _and die._ _You're going to experiment on yourself with the T-Veronica, you idiot. You're going to die, and I won't be able to stop you..._

Even if he could stop her, it wouldn't matter, because it wasn't real.

There was a lull between them, the hum and rattle of the ventilation somewhere, the ghost notes of Satie wafting from the laboratory annex.

"Grayson," said Alexia, hesitantly. "Where do you think you will be in fifteen years?"

"I don't know. Fifteen years is a long time," said Grayson. "I haven't even finished school yet," he added, and shrugged his broad shoulders.

"Just answer the bloody question, Grayson."

Grayson remembered this part. Fifteen-year-old him said, "If things work out? I wanna get married. I'll be, like, nearly thirty then or something."

"Married," said Alexia, as if the word didn't quite fit her mouth. "To who?"

"She's kinda short and nerdy," said Grayson, grinning.

Alexia started to blush. "You mean..."

The dream ended abruptly. Grayson jolted awake, feeling pain. For a moment, in some narcotic haze, he thought it had been Alexia standing at the foot of his bed. But realized it was Alfred, who'd slipped back into psychosis, and his sister's dress and wig.

"You had me worried," said Alfred, in Alexia's voice.

There were bandages on Grayson's hands, where the glass had cut them, and a gauze taped to his head.

"Wesker did a number on you, the brute," said Alfred, handing Grayson a glass of water, which Grayson had some difficulty getting down because his hand shook, and every one of his nerves felt like they were on fire. "I gave you some codeine to ease the pain a little. I don't know how badly he hurt you, but you were a mess when Alfred brought you to me."

"Thanks, Alexia," he said, and lay back down, his head pounding.

"You just rest," said Alfred, and patted Grayson's stomach, glove-silk cool and soft on his skin. Alfred headed toward the door and grabbed the rifle propped against the wall beside it. "I'm expecting some company soon, but I'll be back to check on you."


	13. Interlude 7: The Mansion

Claire had double-backed to Rodrigo, and had given him the hemostats she'd found in the first aid kit. Rodrigo had promised that, once the bleeding stopped and he felt better, he would personally show them to the airport. Claire left her brother's lighter with Rodrigo and told him they'd come back; the lighter was collateral. It had been a gift from her brother Chris, she explained, and though it wasn't particularly valuable, she had a lot of personal sentiment vested in it.

"Where are you two going anyway?" Rodrigo's dark face stared across the worn aluminum desk, the flame from the lighter catching in his eyes and hanging there like embers caged in black pearls.

"We're going after Alfred."

Rodrigo looked hesitant, like he wanted to tell her that was a really bad idea.

"We don't have a choice," said Steve, who was leaning against the wall, hands deep in his pockets. No noise down here, except the occasional drip of water in the dark, or the skittering of mice or rats. "The guy killed my dad, man," he said, frowning grimly. "I found dad back at the training facility. He was infected."

Claire could still see the man's dead peeling face in her mind, and was sure it would be burned there forever. Normally, zombies didn't affect her; they were strangers, things she'd seen before in Raccoon. But that zombie had been Steve's father, and though Steve hadn't talked much about him, Claire had felt a connection, an understanding that Steve's dad had once been a person with a person's life.

"Alfred wasn't responsible for that, kid," said Rodrigo, and before Steve could say anything, he raised his hand, palm out: _wait._ "I'm not defending him. I don't give a shit about the Warden," he clarified. "I'm just saying there's something else going on here, an extenuating circumstance. Alfred loves this fucking rock. He wouldn't destroy it by leaking the T-Virus."

"He's killed people," said Steve. "Guy's a maniac, and needs to die."

"Not arguing that," said Rodrigo, leaning back in his chair. "Listen. Just be careful. Both of you." He paused, watching them, pain around his eyes and mouth. Then, "The mansion's hidden. The clock in Alfred's office. It's behind that. His password's 1971."

"How do you know that?" asked Claire.

"My father helped rebuild the mansion, after a tropical storm had damaged it," said Rodrigo, staring plaintively at the lighter. "He's dead now. Everyone who worked on that mansion is dead." He closed his eyes, like he badly wanted to sleep, a shuddery breath escaping him. Then said, to Steve, "For what it's worth, kid, I'm sorry about your dad."

"We'll come back for you," said Claire, patting Rodrigo on the shoulder. "Promise."

They doubled-back to the Palace, pushing through a steadily growing hoard of undead. It seemed as though the entire island population had been infected, and the undead were following some dog-frequency to the prison compound, an energy like the Sedona Vortex, and they were congregating there, waiting for fresh meat that would never come.

They headed to Alfred's office. Claire stopped to look at the enormous portrait of Alexia on the wall, hanging in the administration building. Alexia looked exactly as she had in the video, but wore a dark dress in the picture, which might have been black, or might have been a really dark purple. The picture looked like something that might have hung in the parlor of some royal's castle, a sober portrait of a Victorian debutante, a distant haughty relative. Alexia's delicate aristocratic features were composed in a look of impatient boredom, as if she'd been posing for a long time, and had just wanted the artist to hurry up and finish.

"I mean, I guess I can see why Grayson liked her," said Steve, studying the portrait. "She's not bad-looking. Actually pretty hot."

Claire couldn't decide if Steve was trying to coax a jealous reaction out of her, or if he honestly thought Alexia was pretty. She decided it was probably both, and it was cute. "Yeah, she is," she agreed. "Come on," she added, pulling him away from the picture. "Burn her image into your brain, so you can drool over it later. We need to head to Alfred's office."

They went to Alfred's office. Claire immediately got serial killer vibes from the place; it was something in the immaculateness of it, like Alfred had spent time scrubbing blood out of the floors and re-arranging all the pieces to precisely the way they were before he'd killed his victim.

She headed to Alfred's desk and sat down, booting up the computer. Luckily, the power was still on; it probably ran on auxiliary power, so Alfred could still get in and out of the mansion. Claire typed 1971 into the pass-code prompt, then clicked OKAY.

The clock, which sat a few feet from the desk, thumped aside, revealing a passageway. "Well, guess Rodrigo wasn't lying," said Claire.

The passageway funneled them into a bridge, which extended across a large ravine, the ocean hissing like a pit of snakes at the bottom, foaming against the crags. They followed the bridge, their path lit by the greasy light of wrought-iron lanterns screwed to the pillars that supported the roof of the bridge. As Claire walked, she thought of Ichabod Crane as he'd crossed the bridge in Sleepy Hollow, and had never been seen again.

Rain pattered around them. She could see the mansion atop the rocky hill, a broad set of stairs leading up to it. The house looked like something that might have been the abandoned set of some forgotten Vincent Price film, built in some vague dollhouse style.

They passed through a surprisingly well-tended garden, the sweet smell of flowers on the air, and of the salt from the ocean. The flower-beds were artfully arranged in colorful geometrics, like botanical Nazca lines. It was gorgeous, and not at all what Claire had expected to find on Alfred's property. The only garden she'd expected to find was the kind of garden Vlad Tepes would have liked, of people skewered on enormous sticks, their intestines wrapped around trellises and pergolas.

The door to the mansion was already open; someone had broken the lock, snapped it clean off. They went inside. A record-player crooned, in an adjacent room. Claire recognized the song from spending time with her grandparents. It was called _So Sorry_ , though she couldn't remember what the band who'd sang it had been called.

"Fucking creepy," said Steve, keeping his voice low. "This mansion, that fucking music."

They climbed three flights of stairs and went through a door at the top. Nobody. She didn't see Alfred, or the butler. The corridor was cluttered with leather-bound books, stacks of yellowing print-outs, lengths of microfiche, and lab instruments—an old microscope, flasks, a Bunsen burner. "We might be walking into an ambush," said Claire, looking at Steve. "Maybe Rodrigo tipped Alfred off?"

"Doubt it," said Steve. "But maybe? This island's fucking ridiculous."

Claire inhaled deeply, exhaled, then entered one of the rooms in the corridor at random, expecting to be greeted by the business end of Alfred's bolt-action. But Claire found the butler instead. Harman was hurt, and seemed to be asleep in the enormous bed, lost under a blue silk duvet.

Steve came in behind her and said, "Let's kill him while he's sleeping."


	14. Part One - An Appeal

Grayson woke to the muzzle of a gun between his eyes.

"Morning, sunshine," said Steve, smiling without mirth. Grayson heard Claire tell Steve to cool off, that they should talk to him because he might know something. Steve shook his head. "No way," he said defiantly, and pushed the gun a little harder against Grayson's skull, the muzzle digging uncomfortably into his flesh. "I bet this clown helped Alfred infect the island. Helped him kill my dad."

"I didn't kill anyone," said Grayson. His head ached, and though the codeine had settled the pain in his nerves, he felt nauseous. He told Steve to move and rolled onto his side, vomiting on the floor. Idly, Grayson wondered if he was having some kind of allergic reaction to the narcotic, or if the stuff really made a person that sick.

Claire pulled Steve away. "The guy's hurt," she said.

"Who cares?" said Steve. "He might try to kill us."

Grayson did not want to kill anyone right now, nor was he in any condition to kill anyone.

"I don't think you're as crazy as Alfred, Harman," said Claire, ignoring Steve. She sat beside Grayson on the bed.

He was crazy. But his craziness was a different, quieter animal than Alfred's.

"What happened to you?" she asked.

Grayson tried to talk, but the words were hard to form. They came as unintelligible sounds because his throat was so dry... Claire passed him the glass of lukewarm water on the bedside table, probably saw the need on his face. He drank it, then said, "Albert Wesker."

Claire knew the name; he could see it in her expression. She stared, her eyes the precise blue of Caribbean water. "Albert Wesker? I thought he was dead," she said. "My brother said he was dead."

"He's not dead," said Grayson, and shook his head, finishing the water. "He kicked the shit out of me. I don't know where he went."

"Where's Alfred, man?" asked Steve. There were little tremors of rage around his mouth, a wild agitation in his eyes. "Where is that fucking freak?" he repeated. "I owe him a bullet for my dad."

"I don't know where Alfred is, kid, and if I did, I wouldn't tell you," said Grayson, and meant it. "He's my employer. A good friend. I got nothing against you or Claire personally, but you hurt Alfred, you're going to make it personal."

Claire got up from the bed and started wandering the room, studying the glass display cases of Alexia's Victorian dolls, which Alexia had never actually liked, but her relatives had kept buying her anyway. She started rifling through Alexia's bookcases, found a photograph and showed it to him. It was a faded Polaroid in a gilded antique frame. It had been taken in the January of 1983, on the day the twin's had turned thirteen. Alfred and Alexia were smiling, and fourteen-year-old him was on Alexia's left, trying to stay out of the photo. "She looks happy in this picture," said Claire. "She always seems to look like that when she's with you. She must have really loved you."

"How would you know? You don't fucking know Alexia."

Claire put the photograph back down on the shelf, then picked up another one. "I saw your video. See? She's smiling like that in this picture, too."

The next photograph depicted Alexia's university graduation. It hadn't been a particularly graceful shot. They stood under a dreary England sky in the photograph, their hair blown by the wind and frozen that way. Alexia was ten-years-old, wore her cap and gown, and a proud smile. Ten-year-old Alfred, and twelve-year-old him, stood on her right. His father, a very tall, very built man, who'd been an ex-marine and had once worked in a steel mill, stood on Alexia's left. "The big guy in the suit looks like you. Is it your dad?" asked Claire.

"Yeah," said Grayson, and shrugged. "Scott Harman. He was the Ashford's original butler."

"Claire, whatever you're trying to do, fuck it. We gotta find Alfred," said Steve, urgently.

Claire put the picture back and said, "Alfred's hurt a lot of people, Grayson. He needs to be stopped. You don't seem like a bad guy. Don't go down with him. You think Alexia would want that?"

Grayson laughed inside his head. Claire really had no idea what Alexia was like, and what she would or wouldn't have approved of. And one thing Alexia would have approved of was how loyal he was to Alfred, and how that loyalty hadn't wavered, not even once, in his twenty-nine years. The thought made him smile involuntarily: a meaningless, reflexive smile. "You don't know the first thing about Alexia," he said.

"He's not gonna help us, Claire," said Steve. "We should—"

The door burst open. It was Alfred, still dressed as Alexia. He cold-cocked Steve with the butt of his rifle, who went down hard, then fired at Claire. Claire lunged to the side of the bullet and landed on a flimsy antique table, which collapsed underneath her. She shot back, but the bullet missed Alfred, shattering the glass of one of the doll displays behind him and chipping off a piece of a doll's porcelain head.

"She's supposed to be dead," said Steve, getting up. Alfred fired again, and Steve clumsily moved to the side, barely missing a bullet to the skull.

"Who ever said I was dead?" said Alfred, and laughed girlishly. "You were going to hurt my butler. So now, I'm going to hurt you."

"We can't fight her here," said Claire, and she grabbed Steve, running for the door.

The laser trailed along the dark floorboards, the red dot trembling between Claire's shoulder blades, on the ME in LET ME LIVE, which was above an acrylic Valkyrie with flaming wings. But she was gone before Alfred could shoot. "You think I should let the little rats run, Grayson?" asked Alfred, with a mad smile. "It could be fun."

"Do whatever you want, Alexia," said Grayson, exhausted. "My head hurts."

"Oh, this will be fun." Alfred started after Claire and Steve, who Grayson could hear crashing around the corridor. "You just rest, Grayson. Leave the pests to me and my dear brother."


	15. Interlude 8: So Long - Part One End

Another bullet ripped past her, and if she had never experienced Raccoon, she would have probably screamed. Steve ran behind her, and he looked scared. They turned down an adjacent corridor, their footsteps thumping on the floorboards. Alexia never seemed to fall too far behind them. Claire could feel her presence at the end of every hallway, the laser always red-glinting in her periphery. She stumbled over a stack of old books, and just barely managed to scramble out of the way of another shot.

"You can keep running, but you'll never get very far," said Alexia. Her footsteps came cool, unhurried. "I know this mansion," she taunted, in a voice that made Claire think of ice water. "Every floor, every nook. You can't hide from me."

"Jesus," said Steve, panting. He moved to the side of another shot, which shattered one of the panes of a nearby window.

Claire turned and fired two shots at Alexia, neither of which had seemed to hit her. She could not see very well; the mansion, at least this part of it, was pitch-dark. Alexia's scope probably had night-vision, which put Claire at a major disadvantage.

They found themselves inside the foyer, after they had done a circuit of the corridors, which, in their pointlessly confusing maze-complexity, had seemed as if the architect had been inspired by the Labyrinth of Crete, and had tried to recreate it while riding a wave of methamphetamine.

There was light in the foyer, the sort of dim incadescence she imagined had once illuminated the lobbies of 1920s hotels. She hadn't noticed on the way in, but it lookedlike Grayson had been telling the truth about Albert Wesker. A fight had definitely happened here. Glass strewn over the carpet, some of the pieces stained with blood. There was a blood-stain on the wall too, near some pictures, which had fallen from their hooks; and Claire remembered the gauze on Grayson's head.

"There you are," came Alexia's voice, and she stood on the third floor of the foyer, peering through the rifle-scope.

Red light beaded in Claire's eye. Steve pushed her out of the way, and they rolled down the stairs, hitting the floorboards hard. Alexia smoothly descended the steps. She was smiling, and it was the coldest smile Claire had ever seen. "Both of you helped Albert infect my family's island," she said, coolly. "I can't forgive you for that. You're going to die."

Claire squeezed her eyes shut, remembered something her father had said once about God, and how, when you were about to die, and if you asked for forgiveness and sincerely meant it in that moment, you would not go to Hell. Claire had never been as religious as her father, but the thought comforted her. She waited for the bullet, but the bullet never came.

She opened her eyes. Alexia was staring at her reflection in a beveled mirror, framed in scrolled French gold-leaf. A long blonde wig lay on the floor at her feet.

Alfred looked confused, and then scared, and then calm, like he'd resigned to some silent, inalienable truth.

A mad gleam came to Alfred's eyes then, and the make-up he wore heightened the effect of craziness, his face like the caricature of some mad Edvard Munch clown. He seemed to have completely forgotten about them, and said, to himself, "I remember." He started to laugh giggle: "Yes, that's right." Alfred started up the steps, still giggling. " _I remember_."

An alarm suddenly blared, and a mechanical voice announced they had two hours until the facility blew up.

Who had set the alarm off? It couldn't have been Alfred, Claire decided. Maybe Rodrigo, as a final 'fuck you' to Alfred? Or had Wesker thrown the switch because he wanted to cover his tracks? Claire decided it didn't ultimately matter; they needed to get off Rockfort. "Steve, let's go," she said, and grabbed him by the wrist, and pulled him outside, into the rain.

They ran the entire way back to Rodrigo, skirting the infected whenever they could, killing them whenever they could not. Claire skidded and stumbled in the mud, through the small graveyard—the headstones here were blank prisoner graves—and down into the substructure where Rodrigo, and the holding cells, were. She loped down the concrete steps, smelling the mildew down here, and the groundwater.

Rodrigo was still at the desk, but looked better than he had when they'd left him. "I think the attackers set the alarm off," said Rodrigo, getting up and limping over to a set of armory lockers. He unlocked one with his keycard and passed Claire and Steve some magazines for their guns, and nylon leg rigs. "As promised, I'll take you to the airport."

They left the holding cells. Rodrigo knew about tunnels under Rockfort, and took them below.

He explained that the concrete tunnels spanned the entire compound, and had been built by drug cartels who had used the island, prior to the expansion to the paramilitary compound, to stash cocaine for transport to South America.

Claire learned a little bit about Rodrigo too: he was head of one of the security units here, and had lost most of his extended family in Alfred's gulag experiment. His father had been a carpenter who had done, before Umbrella, contract-work in Lima, and his mother had taken care of his five siblings and him, and his cousin Florentino, who had lost his parents when they had died from a particularly serious and fatal strain of malaria ("There are no hospitals on Rockfort," explained Rodrigo. "The only medical care you receive here is whatever Umbrella decides to give you. As you can imagine, the Ashfords weren't particularly giving. The Warden was more concerned with his paramilitary budget").

Rodrigo scaled a ladder, and they followed him. They emerged in a gigantic hangar, which smelled of concrete and the sea. There was only one sea-plane, painted an ugly puke-green, and emblazoned with the Umbrella hexagon. Claire guessed other survivors had taken the other planes.

"I can get you aboard," said Rodrigo, and punched his ID into a small computer terminal, which sat beside a hydraulic platform that vaguely resembled a cherry-picker. Even though he looked better than he had before, he still looked like he was in pain. He'd wince, here and there, and complain about his side hurting.

"Aren't you coming with us, man?" asked Steve. The robotic voice announced that they had two hours until detonation. "You can't stay here. You'll die."

Rodrigo reached into his fatigues, coming up with the lighter Claire had left him. He handed it to her, and she took it. "Thanks, Claire. I won't be needing it."

"Rodrigo, the plane is right there," said Claire, pocketing the lighter. "There's more than enough room for all three of us. What's the point of dying here?"

Rodrigo shook his head. "Just go," he said, grimly. "Besides, the medicine only staunched the bleeding. I'm going to die anyway."

Claire wanted to argue, but Rodrigo wouldn't listen and forced her onto the lift. She knew Rodrigo would not change his mind; he was one of those committed stubborn types, just like her brother. "Fine," she said, and turned to the control panel, flipping the switch. The platform lurched, then dropped and extended, so they could access the door of the plane.

Rodrigo craned his neck over the lip of the platform, and asked, "Your brother is Chris Redfield, right?"

"How do you know that?"

"Your brother is being monitored by Umbrella. I'm going to contact him and tell him where to find you."

"How do you know where we're even going?" said Claire. "We could go anywhere in the world, and you'd never have a way of knowing where."

"Trust me," he said darkly. "I know where you're going. I'll be sure to tell your brother, so he finds you." Then Rodrigo was gone.

Claire boarded the plane, confused. The hatch swung shut behind her, and the gaskets sealed with a _poosh_. Steve sat at the controls of the plane, reviewing a laminated spiral-bind manual. "I'm super into planes," he said, as she sat down in the co-pilot's seat. "I've been into them since I was five, when my dad took me to an air-show my uncle was performing in. I wanted to fly fighters." He grinned, then said, "I think I can fly this piece of shit."

She was glad that Steve knew how to fly planes. Her brother had been in the Air Force, but he'd never taught her how to fly. "Rodrigo said he would contact my brother," she said. "That he knew where we're going."

Steve started flipping switches, then pushed the throttle forward. The turbines roared, and the plane lurched, started sliding along the water, and up, Rockfort falling away underneath them. They were soaring above open ocean now.

Steve said, "We're going to Hawaii. Dunno how he'll know that, without some kinda crystal ball."

It suddenly occurred to Claire, as she watched rain splattering against the windshield, that Rodrigo had not given them those guns for their escape from Rockfort. He had prepared them for something. Then she remembered what Rodrigo had said: _I know where you're going_.

Claire shook her head. As far as she could see, they were free, and Alfred was no longer their problem. And once Rodrigo had contacted Chris, then Chris would know about Alfred, and he would fly in with the rest of S.T.A.R.S, and swiftly put an end to Alfred's prison-camp bullshit.

"Hey, Claire?" Steve looked at her. "You've dealt with weird Umbrella shit before. What was Alfred's deal?"

"In charge of some backwater like Rockfort? The company was trying to placate Alfred, I'm pretty sure." Claire sat up a little straighter in her chair and frowned, remembering something: "I didn't make the connection until now, but I know the Ashford name. Saw something about them, in some files my brother had. Their grandfather was one of the original founders of Umbrella. Ashford family was supposedly a huge proponent of eugenics, and had donated millions to eugenics research."

"Well, explains why they were trying to placate him," said Steve, and shrugged. "The him-being-a-grandkid-of-the-founder thing, I mean."

"Yeah," said Claire. "I feel bad for him. Sort of. He was so upset about his sister's death, he started dressing up like her. And Harman? You should have seen his face when I showed him those pictures." She paused, then said, "I saw a bottle of anti-psychotics in the room, and the prescription was for Alfred. The bottle had never been opened."

"And the guy just fell into his delusions. Shit," said Steve. "Either case, I don't really fucking care. He's dead, just like his butler. That island is gone."

"I wish Harman would have just cooperated," said Claire. "I think we could have saved him."

"See, your problem," said Steve, without looking at her, "is that you keep thinking the best about people, Claire. Some people are just sacks of shit, and Harman's a sack of shit, just like Alfred."


	16. Interlude 9: To Antarctica

Rain came down in sheets, thunder roiling in the clouds. Wesker approached the air-strip. Most of it was in a sad state, a moldering concrete ruin. It had once, according to some records he had found on the island, belonged to the Ashfords, and had been their private airport. These days, the airport was mostly used by choppers for off-loading prisoners, or small planes that weren't sea-suited.

What remained of his men—there were only a dozen or so—were crowded around a matte black jet, waiting. One of them approached him, handing him a manila folder stuffed with print-outs. "Sir," said the man, and Wesker was sure his name was Callahan, though could not for the life of him remember what Callahan's rank was, or what unit he belonged to. Wesker rarely worked within the units; he simply directed them. "You might want to look at this."

The rain sizzled across the ruined concrete. Wesker ducked under one of the wings of the jet, so the rain would not soak the papers. He leafed through the papers, which were stapled to the inside of the folder. It was a collection of cargo logs, which had probably been collecting dust in a filing cabinet somewhere. "These are just cargo logs," said Wesker, irritated. "What do I care about fucking cargo logs? This is why you called me away from the mansion? To waste my time?"

For a moment, Callahan looked apprehensive. He was young, his sandy-blonde hair closely shaved to his skull. Callahan could not have been older than twenty-three. He still had that eager collegiate look that Wesker often saw on the new recruits. "The last log, sir," said Callahan, and he turned to the page. "Think you might find it interesting."

Wesker looked. _Now_ , he thought, _this was interesting_. The log contained the specs for a cryobox—Umbrella often employed the containers in transporting bioweapons—though it failed to specify what sort of bioweapon was inside it. It seemed Alfred had attempted to transport the specimen from Antarctica to Rockfort last month, and the task had been given to HUNK; but the transport had never been made. It was still filed as pending. "Alfred was attempting to move a bioweapon? Very interesting indeed." He grinned at Callahan and passed the folder back to him. "Good work, Callahan. I'll be sure our superiors are notified of your assistance."

Callahan smiled, and then he went away. Dimly, from across several miles, Wesker heard the loop of the self-destruct sequence, and the wail of the emergency sirens. They were several miles outside the blast radius; the bombs did not have very impressive payloads, but they would do nicely in obliterating any evidence that connected him to Rockfort.

There was a sudden boom, and then another, and the base went up in flames, the ground shaking underneath his boots from the aftershock. Wesker thought of Pompeii, and wondered if this view had been similar to the view the villagers had seen before their lives had been extinguished by fire. A reek of gasoline and burning rubber, and of cooked human rot, came up from the facility, blown by the wind. He heard the scream of turbines, and saw a jet flying low, from the direction of the base.

The jet was a Dassault by the looks of it, and it was emblazoned with the Ashford insignia: a golden eagle with its wings spread, clutching a halberd in its talons. "So you escaped Rockfort, Alfred," he said aloud, watching the plane shrink away, until it was gone in the sky. He smiled. "I know where you're going."


	17. Part Two - She Woke Up

The base was a remote structure several miles inland from the northern Antarctic coast, over dramatic glaciers and frozen lakes.

Grayson passed the last leg of the flight counting penguins, or whatever the little black dots down there on the glaciers were, watching the occasional whale breaking through the icy water, spouting shimmering plumes of blow-hole mist. Alfred managed to land the plane on the icy tarmac without skidding into the facility, which had been abandoned for a long time, and, in its current dilapidated state, made Grayson think of the base in _The Thing_. When the jet stopped, and the hangar doors closed behind them, they got out of the cockpit and found some thick thermal jackets and gloves in the staff-lockers of the processing office.

They walked through a pair of white-painted steel fire doors. Grayson had been fifteen when he'd come here with his father and the Ashfords. Alexia had been there, had looked unimpressed with the eager staff who had come to see their new boss, Umbrella's shining girl prodigy. The corridor was a lonely stretch of ferroconcrete, plastered in faded safety signs and worn cork-boards, where several yellowing advertisements that described Umbrella's excellent health benefits had been tacked: pamphlets of young smiling 1980s faces with UMBRELLA HAS YOU COVERED, spelled out in dated font.

The facility was an enormous concrete maze, which reminded Grayson of the tunnels in an ant farm. Shatterproof windows showed identical stainless steel labs, and each lab looked exactly like the other labs, like the facility was self-replicating. The automatic doors worked too, which meant someone had turned on the power, or the place had been running on an auxiliary grid. Though he couldn't guess why an abandoned facility would need to run a power sub-system—unless there was something here that Umbrella wanted to keep alive.

When they arrived in the main atrium, which had been built around an old mineshaft, Grayson smelled burnt machinery and gasoline. There was a plane, which had smashed through the wall, dripping fuel onto the concrete. Alfred had re-programmed the survivor's flight-paths from the Dassault they had flown in on. Grayson did not find any bodies, so whoever had flown it was probably still alive, or they had been infected, had turned, and had wandered off into the facility in search of fresh people-meat.

"They really did shut this place down right after Alexia's death," said Grayson aloud, his breath steaming in the air. With all the researchers gone, the place felt like a tomb. There was no sound, except the howl of the wind beyond the dome-glass, and the occasional groan of metal as some component of the plane shifted, then settled.

"Are you feeling better, Grayson?" asked Alfred, and he leaned on the railing, staring down into the mineshaft.

He did feel better now. His head occasionally ached, perhaps a minor concussion. "Yeah. Wesker did a number on me, but he didn't kill me." One of the slabs in the glass dome was missing, and thick gray clouds of snowflakes wheeled down into the mineshaft, stinging his cheeks with the cold. "Why are we here, Alfred?" he asked. "Did we really come here just to chase Claire and Steve?"

"No. I actually have another reason for coming here," said Alfred, and it sounded as if he was about to confess some deep shameful secret. Then, with particular gravitas, "Alexia is alive."

Grayson didn't speak because he could not think of anything that adequately conveyed his feelings. It was an intense, almost painful elation; then that feeling became something else—white-hot fury which simmered under his skin, but never quite broke the careful tension of his flesh. "You knew she was alive for fifteen years," he said, and his tone had gone sub-zero. "Fifteen years, she was alive. And you _lied_ to me about it, Alfred. You knew— _know_ —how much I love her. And you just _stayed quiet_ about it?"

"I'd forgotten," said Alfred, defensively. He shielded his face, like he expected to be hit. Grayson did hit him, but had punched him in the stomach instead, and had done it as hard as he could. "Okay," said Alfred, doubling over, winded. "I deserved that."

" _Where is she_?" Grayson threw another punch, but Alfred had countered the blow this time and jabbed him in the face, bloodying his nose. Despite his delicate appearance, Alfred was tough. He'd trained as a boxer, and had learned Sambo from an ex-Soviet officer named Sergei Vladimir, who ran the Caucasus laboratory, and who Alfred had met through Spencer.

Alfred put his fists up, shuffling his feet in the way a seasoned boxer did. "If you would bloody calm down, I'll show you."

Grayson swung again. Alfred caught his arm and twisted it into a lock, then flipped Grayson onto his back, punching his face again. Grayson settled down then, dizzy, his nose hurting. "Okay, okay," said Grayson. "Enough with the Bruce Lee shit." Alfred let go, and Grayson stood. "Sorry," he added, staring at the pockmarks and cracks in the concrete because he was ashamed he had hit Alfred.

"It's fine." Alfred studied his sapphire ring. "Alexia went into cryostasis for fifteen years. It was for her research." He looked searchingly at the ring, as if he expected it to remind him of something he'd forgotten, his forehead creasing with the effort of recollecting so much vague detail. "She had tasked me with waking her up, but between my _episodes_ , that knowledge had fallen through the cracks..."

"Why didn't she tell me? Didn't she trust me?"

"Of course she trusted you, Grayson," said Alfred, looking at him. He put a reassuring hand on Grayson's bicep and squeezed, in an awkward male expression of support. "A lot can happen in fifteen years, Grayson. Alexia wasn't sure if you would stay with us, once she was gone. I was the safer, surer option."

"I'm not my father," said Grayson." His father had gone away about two years ago because Grayson had told him to. Alfred's psychosis had been too much for his father to handle, so he'd packed his bags and had gone to Hoboken, where he'd died of a heart-attack while dusting the shelves in his modest two-bedroom. For whatever reason, Grayson resented his father for leaving, even though he had been the one who'd told him to go. "Sure, I went away for a little while," he said. "But we never became estranged, did we?"

"No, we didn't," said Alfred, flashing a rare smile. "I know we have a strange love-hate friendship, but know that I do, and always have, loved you like a brother, Grayson." He clapped Grayson on the arm. Then asked, "I suppose you want to see her?"

Grayson nodded. "More than anything, Alfred."

Gunshot noise. Alfred's expression collapsed suddenly, became something pained, as if it had frozen halfway into a wince. Alfred grabbed a fistful of Grayson's flight suit, the fabric stained with a dark bloom of blood, and sank to his knees. Steve stood a few feet away, Claire flanking his right. Both wore arctic gear they had probably scavenged from the facility. Steve was pointing a gun.

Grayson wanted to cry, but did not. He'd forgotten how, because it had been so long. He had not even cried at his father's funeral. There were only two times Grayson could remember he'd ever cried: when he'd heard Alexia had died, and when he'd attended her closed-casket funeral in Beaconsfield. "You son of a fucking bitch," he said.

"The guy was fucking crazy," said Steve, his voice echoing in the atrium. "He killed my fucking father. Killed and tortured people. I just did the world a fucking favor!"

Claire looked conflicted, as if she couldn't decide if they had done a good thing. Then she said, "Harman, I'm sorry.

Alfred was still conscious, Grayson's flight suit bunched between his fingers. He pulled Grayson down and said, in his ear, "She's in her laboratory, Grayson, near the ant-hive." His voice was barely above a whisper, and he was losing a lot of blood. The bullet had probably struck Alfred's heart, judging by the location of the wound. He did not have long. "You remember the place, don't you? The code... is Veronica. Alexia left instructions to—" he winced—"follow, and"—Alfred's breathing became more shallow, and he started to go cold—"wake her up."

His eyes stared up at nothing, and looked like the blue plastic eyes of Alexia's dolls. Hot tears blurred the edges of Grayson's vision. Alfred was gone, his skin cold silicon flesh now, stretched over someone else's bones. "You didn't deserve to die like this," he said, cradling Alfred's cold body close to his chest, as if he'd expected the warmth to bring him back.

"It had to be done, Grayson," said Claire. "Alfred was too dangerous. Too unstable. He would have hurt people."

Grayson did not answer her. He collected Alfred's body, making his way down to Alexia's laboratory. He wouldn't kill Steve here. He would wait until Alexia had woken up, and he'd tell her what Steve had done to her brother. And then they would kill Steve together.

They didn't follow him, and Grayson suspected Claire had something to do with that. She was too understanding, too unobtrusive because of her youth, and that was good, it made things significantly less complicated for him. Down a lift, then down another, Grayson arrived at the level Alexia had maintained her laboratory, and the giant ant-hive she had used for her research on colony dynamics. The ants were still alive: clusters of black bean-like things skittering across the perforated surface of the hive, their swollen abdomens glittering like fat oil beads in the light.

Alexia's office, and her laboratory, were in a hallway on his left. There was a door at the end of it, one of those blast-proof doors that looked like something out of the Fort Knox vaults, and was sealed when he'd tried to open it. _The code is Veronica_ , he thought, and he punched VERONICA into the passcode prompt on the terminal mounted by the door. As he waited for the door to open, Grayson remembered a joke he'd once told Alexia about the door. Something about Tartarus and titans, though he couldn't quite remember how the joke had gone, just that Alexia had laughed at the punchline.

The door slid open with a smooth hiss.

Inside, suspended in a tube, was Alexia.

The tube was on a raised platform, surrounded by whirring computers and monitors displaying life-support feeds: EKG, anatomical rendering, X-rays, something with a DNA helix on it, parts of the protein chains lit up red, blue, and yellow. Alexia floated in the tube like some sort of cryoangel: her wings were cables, wires, and fat rubber tubes, and her halo was the cold fluorescent light. Her perfect features were composed in a look of Saint-sleep, illuminated by the phosphorescent glow of the tube-liquid.

Grayson started to cry, for the first time in fifteen years. Partly because he was so glad to see Alexia again, to know she wasn't dead, and partly because Alfred was dead, and there was nothing he could do to change that. He laid Alfred on the floor and pressed his hand to the tube-glass; it was flesh-warm under his fingertips. "Jesus," he said, his breath fogging the glass. Alexia was no longer the thirteen-year-old girl he remembered. She was a twenty-seven-year-old woman now, more beautiful than he could have ever imagined.

There was a laminated sheet of instructions taped to a nearby desk, which detailed, painstakingly, and in layman's terms, how to initiate the wake-sequence. As he read the instructions, her tone was there in the text, and he could almost hear Alexia's voice reading them to him:

 _The first step, Grayson, is to boot up the bloody computer_.

 _The second step is to type C:\\\ BOOT\YES into the command prompt—no, you're doing it wrong. You forgot the other slash. Fix that, you idiot. It's the wrong directory. Good. That's correct._

He was happy Alexia had had enough foresight to leave instructions, because he wasn't a technical man, especially when it came to computers. Alfred had known more about computers than he did.

 _The third step, Grayson, is to confirm. No. Don't click anything. Stop that. Just wait a moment. Okay. Now hit YES_.

 _Now just bloody wait for it. It won't take long._

Grayson waited. The machines in the room flickered and chugged, and for a moment, he worried the power had surged, that he'd fucked something up and had lost Alexia too. But the machines stabilized. The tank started to drain. Alexia opened her eyes beyond the aquarium glass like some modern Snow White, awakened by the magic kiss of technology. The tube opened, and Alexia stumbled out, water pooling around her feet. She gasped as if she'd been holding her breath for fifteen years; then she doubled over and vomited bile on the floor, dry-heaved a few times, and then vomited again.

Grayson rushed to Alexia. She didn't immediately recognize him. "It's me, Alexia," said Grayson soothingly, like he was talking to a newborn. "It's Grayson. Remember me? Scott Harman's boy."

Her forehead creased, as if she was concentrating very hard on something. She spoke slowly, as if English was new to her, and she was doing her best not to offend him with her broken use of it. "Moment, please," she said, and she watched him with her pale, pale eyes. "Long time," she choked out. "Cognitive functions not quite caught up. Very sick."

Grayson held her, and stayed like that for a long time. He had not even cared when Alexia had vomited on him. "I'm sorry, Alexia," he said. "Alfred. He's gone."

Alexia looked at Alfred's corpse. Her expression wasn't particularly sad; it was angry, the sort of angry which simmered under the skin but never quite displaced the neutrality of polite everyday flesh. If he didn't know Alexia as well as he did and had seen her expression, Grayson would have assumed she hadn't cared about Alfred at all.

On the monitors, Grayson saw some kind of yellow snow-truck, its thick rubber treads kicking up snow clouds which seemed to freeze in the air like a photograph, diamond-shimmering in the Arctic sun. Then from the corner of the monitor, two tentacle-looking things slithered into view and sped toward the truck. The tentacle things punched through the windshield and windows, shook the vehicle violently, then rolled it into the snowdrifts like a toy.

"Was that you?" he asked, still holding her as if she would be ripped away from him at any moment like Eurydice had been ripped away from Orpheus, sucked back into some untraversable vacuum, back into the Underworld. Grayson stared at the monitors, watching the tentacle things retreating into the edges of the camera, and from view.

Alexia did not say anything. She looked too sick to say anything. Grayson supposed that wasn't surprising; her senses had been reality-deprived for fifteen years. "I'm going to bring you back to the mansion," he said, and kissed her, tasting the bitterness of bile. "I just need to do something first."

Grayson could not bury Alfred in the tundra. He settled on placing him in the cryogenic tube, which was the closest thing Grayson had to a casket. Since he did not have any flowers, Grayson left a faded Polaroid he carried in his wallet, which depicted Alfred and Alexia standing in front of the Antarctic mansion circa Christmas 1983, and himself at fifteen, wearing the _Thriller_ jacket Alexia had bought him.


	18. Part Two - Reaffirmation

The mansion was exactly as Grayson had remembered it, and it was warm. It smelled of stale Honduran cigars and bourbon, and of dead flowers. The floor was made up of polished marble slabs. A long Persian runner decorated the stairwell, which divided into two smaller staircases that went left and right, and curved up into the balustrade. An art deco chandelier hung from the ceiling, which was domed, and painted in a beautiful fresco that depicted a dark maelstrom of Greek tragic heroes.

They went through a door at the top of the stairs. A dim carpeted corridor, only wide enough for two people to walk abreast, the molding walls decorated with dark landscapes framed in gold leaf, and frowning portraits of long-dead Ashfords. Austere bookcases, gilded lamps, candelabras, marble busts, and plants that had died years ago cluttered what limited floorspace there was, as if some mad Victorian professor had thrown the contents of their office into the Ashford's halls.

Alexia's room looked identical to her room on Rockfort, and reflected her bizarre taste in Jigsaw Gothic architecture. The walls were arterial red, and the furniture was of the variety that would have been right at home in the Lizzie Borden House. The place had a sweet stink of perfume, which had congealed into a sort of heady must, a by-product of fifteen years of neglect and infrequent airing. Grayson could not take it, and he needed a distraction anyway to keep his mind off Alfred, so he laid Alexia in the bed and started to clean.

While he had been cleaning, he found an old dress in one of the wardrobes which looked about Alexia's size. It was a dark violet eyelet silk dress that looked as if it belonged on the Titanic, on the body of some Edwardian noblewoman. He found some shoes in the closet too, and though he wasn't sure if they would even fit Alexia, they were the only shoes he'd found.

Grayson laid the clothes out for her, then went to shower. Thankfully, the water still worked; he hadn't showered since before the Rockfort outbreak, and was slowly becoming aware of the smell of his own stale sweat.

When he'd finished, he shaved with a straight-razor and managed not to cut himself. He brushed his teeth with a disposable toothbrush he'd found in one of the drawers of the sink, and had also found a small jar of pomade there. Grayson applied it to his hair, working it through with his fingers and combing it back in artful sand-garden waves. Then he threw out his old suit, and found a black three-piece suit hanging inside the closet of his father's old room, still in the dry-cleaner's plastic. He helped himself to his father's cologne, which still smelled great, despite the fact that it hadn't been used for nearly two decades.

Grayson dressed and went back to Alexia's room. She was still resting. Her fifteen years in isolation had taken a huge physical toll on her. He'd read something about a phenomenon called prisoner's cinema, where prisoners confined to the darkness for long periods of time would begin to see vaguely humanoid shapes in the darkness to compensate their lack of human contact. Grayson wondered if those fifteen years had been like that for Alexia.

He stroked her head, then lay beside her. He was tired, but couldn't fall asleep. Too much had happened. He kept thinking about Alfred, replaying the scenario over and over again, trying to see if there had been something he could have done to save him. If he'd paid better attention, he would have seen Steve, and he would have taken the bullet instead. If he'd just stood on Alfred's left, the bullet would have hit him. If he'd just urged Alfred to go to any other room but the atrium, Steve would have never had his shot...

Somehow Grayson slept, or perhaps he had fallen into an indefinite rest and thought he'd slept, and was woken by a physical presence in the room. Alexia was dressed in the clothes he'd brought her, sitting at the writing desk and scribbling something on paper by the soft glow of a shaded lamp.

"What are you doing?" he asked, and it felt strange talking to Alexia. This was how his dreams normally went: he would be in some room with Alexia, and they would talk or make love, and then the dream would freeze-frame, and he would wake up alone.

There was a hot cup of tea on the desk. She didn't say anything, and sipped the tea. Her back was toward him, and the back of the dress was cut low, showed the line of her spine, and the pronounced curves of her scapula. "Testing myself," she said finally. Her voice was smokier now, with a soft English lilt. "Fifteen years in cryostasis could have had a profound negative effect on my mental faculties."

It wasn't a dream, and he was glad it wasn't. Grayson fixed his suit and his hair, because he wanted to look presentable to her, and climbed out of the bed. He leaned over her shoulder. She was writing sentences on the paper, describing ant pheromones, and how they worked to facilitate effective communication among a colony. It was like reading a fact in an encyclopedia, but Alexia had never had much of a creative flair. Alfred had been pretty good at writing poetry, and had often written pieces whenever he wasn't touring the Rockfort facility, or meeting with Umbrella higher-ups. He had always said, whenever Grayson would ask about his poems, that the samurai wrote haiku.

Gently, Grayson tugged at her hair, as he'd often done as a kid. It had originally been conceived as a means to annoy Alexia, but had later developed into a sort of affectionate gesture. "Dork," he teased, and there was a feeling in his chest, of something welling up. Grayson hugged her, unable to stop himself. "Jesus," he said, and buried his face in her hair, which smelled of the shower, and was still a little damp. "I missed you so fucking much."

Her fingers slid along his sleeve, and she slipped her hand inside, feeling his skin. "I missed you too," she said, and looked at him. Her face was no longer soft and girlish, but angular and thin, a woman's face. "I really did miss you," she added, and Alexia kissed him, pushing her mouth against his, coiling her arms around his neck and pulling him down into a stoop.

She slipped her tongue into his mouth, the wet wriggle of it against his teeth, a hunger in the kiss of pure human need. Grayson had thrown himself too deeply into the kiss, and had leaned too far forward. He gracelessly tumbled into Alexia, knocking her and the seat over.

She lay underneath him and laughed, though it was the soft laugh of someone whose head hurt too much to be loud. "You haven't changed at all," said Alexia, watching him, stroking his cheek. She smiled, though it was the sad smile of someone who had lost a lot, of someone who was too emotionally drained. It had been the same threadbare smile he'd worn for the last fifteen years. "You're so much bigger," she said. "How tall are you now, Grayson?"

"6'4, I think. Maybe closer to 6'5," he said.

"I see you've also been working out," she teased, and squeezed his arm. "And your voice is so much deeper."

"Hauling heavy loads of laundry up three flights of stairs every day will do that. The voice? Dulcet, isn't it," said Grayson, and smiled. It was the first genuine smile he'd given anyone in a long time. "Not too mention all the physical work involved with grounds-keeping. Keeps you in shape. Alfred was too busy—"Grayson shook his head—"I'm so sorry, Alexia."

Alexia slipped her arms around his neck and pulled his head down into the crook of her neck. She was wearing perfume, which had the distinct smell of fresh lilacs after a spring rain. He knew the smell from when he'd gardened on Rockfort. "There was nothing you could have done, I'm sure," said Alexia, looking at him. "The two people who killed him will pay for what they did, Grayson."

"How did you—"

"Snow trucks don't drive themselves, and I know you would never kill Alfred," said Alexia. "Deductive reasoning."

"So those tentacle things _were_ you."

"An extension of myself," said Alexia. "They aren't part of me. Think of them as proxies, I suppose."

"Where do they come from?"

"A plant underneath the facility, which I had cultivated using T-Veronica." Alexia stood, and she helped him up. She could not have been much taller than 5'9, maybe 5'10.

Grayson told her everything that had happened since he'd left Rockfort. When he'd told her Wesker was still alive and had been looking for her, and that Wesker had almost killed him, she was furious; though she'd quickly settled down when they had heard something shuffling beyond the bedroom door. He casually mentioned it was probably a zombie. "Some survivors commandeered a few planes on Rockfort," he explained, watching her across the lacquered expanse of a small table. "Someone was probably infected, and infected the others."

"I know," said Alexia affirmatively, but failed to elaborate on how she knew that. She shook her head. "Alfred. What did you do with his body?"

"I put him in the cryotank. There wasn't anywhere I could get a casket, Alexia," he said.

"It's better than leaving him out for the zombies to eat," said Alexia, and frowned, as if the thought of her brother as food had struck a deep, unpleasant chord inside her.

"We should have a wake for Alfred," he suggested. "Nothing formal, obviously. Something small. I found some bourbon when I'd gone into dad's room. We could go to the parlor, catch up. Celebrate Alfred's life. I know traditionally you hold a wake near the body, but I don't really want to go back into that room."

"Nor do I," said Alexia, and she stood.

"You're probably hungry too," said Grayson. "I don't know if there's anything left in this place, but if there is, it's going to be canned. So don't expect anything fancy."

"We can't divert too long," said Alexia, looking at him. "If Wesker is looking for me, he will come here. And from what you'd told me, he's quite determined to find me." She paused, reaching for his face and turning his head, inspecting the purplish-yellow bruises there. "You're sure you're okay, Grayson?"

"I'll be fine," he assured her.

"You said that when you were twelve, too. And what did the doctor find?"

"A small skull fracture," he conceded, and sighed. "It was your fault. You pushed me into the reflecting pool out front of the mansion, and I banged my head on the bottom."

"I didn't know it was that shallow, for one. Two, we were playing." They walked out of the bedroom, into the dim hall. Whatever had made the shuffling noise was gone now. "And as I recall the incident, you'd started it by getting a little too rough in our game of tag, after I'd expressly told you to stop."

Grayson chuckled, and tugged at her hair. "Shut up, dork."


	19. Interlude 10: Chris Redfield

Whatever had attacked the snow-truck had her around the ankle, and it was dragging Claire through the snow. It whipped her into the air and slammed her against the permafrost, and it was a painful pile driver impact, as if she had been thrown against concrete. Every part of her hurt, and the thing was relentless: it slung her around, then it would catch and hurl her against the snow, and then it would do it again, and again.

Claire managed to twist around and shoot, sliding along the snow like a greased sled. The tentacle thing groaned as if it was in pain, and she must have hit it in the right spot because it let go, and it retreated somewhere like a wounded animal. She tumbled through the drifts, the gray-white world somersaulting around her. Eventually, Claire slid to a stop, and she was winded, felt blood soaking her socks.

 _Thorns,_ she thought. That thing had had thorns.

Her ankle was burning, a similar sensation to the lingering pain of a scratch that never quite penetrated the skin; and then it would fluctuate to an intensely profound pain. It made her think of the sort of pain that came with bullet ant bites. She had read about the bites once in a _National Geographic_ article, and people likened the bite to being shot, and as someone who had been shot before, Claire agreed with the assessment.

She holstered the gun on her leg and limped through the drifts, away from the burning snow truck wreck, which flickered brightly on the horizon like a bonfire meant to signal planes. _SOS_ , Claire thought. _Help us_. _There are survivors here_. She wondered if the people in the Australian observation base could see the fire, though she doubted it.

This deep inland, there was nothing. It was a dead world of white and gray, and of an intense silence which made Claire think of limbo, of apocalypse, and of the cells of prisoners who had been sentenced to solitary confinement. The silence, besides the emptiness of the land, was the thing that scared Claire the most about Antarctica. Anywhere else, there was always ambient noise, things happening: birds, traffic, conversations. Here, the silence simply hung in the air, a tangible thing like heavy tarp.

Ahead, through the veil of snow, Claire could see the ghost of the Antarctica facility. She and Steve had been so close to getting away... But Steve was gone now, and all she could think about right now was the relative warmth of the facility, because the thermal gear she wore had been designed for short-term use and hadn't been cared for in years.

Somehow, Claire made it to the facility after what had felt like hours. She staggered through an old maintenance door, which led to the garage where she and Steve had taken the snow truck. The garage was big, and seemed to have been converted from an airplane hangar. It was still cold in there, but there were walls to protect against the wind and snow, and the chugging remnants of a heating system which warmed the facility to a tolerable forty degrees.

Claire had never figured out why the power had still been online when she and Steve had arrived in the facility, but was glad it had been. She sagged against the wall and winced, rolling up her pant-leg to assess her injury. There was a half-ring of blood and torn skin around her ankle, and it was deep, and would probably need stitches. It still burned horribly, and she worried that the thorns on the tentacle might have been poisoned.

"I'm going to fucking die," said Claire, and she cursed under her breath, staring at the skylight, where gray arctic sun filtered into the garage-space, which smelled of gasoline and rust. "I survive fucking Raccoon City, just to die in some fucking abandoned Umbrella facility." She wondered if Steve was even still alive, and if he was, and if Claire could will herself to move again, where would she find him?

"This is all Alfred's fucking fault," said Claire. She wanted to cry, but was too exhausted. She knew she couldn't just sit here and die. All she needed to do was get up. But the thought of getting up, of moving anywhere, felt so impossible to her.

Claire heard something move nearby. It didn't sound like a zombie. Zombies moved aimlessly, in dumb herd patterns. This sound was someone walking slowly, as if proceeding with caution. Had one of the Rockfort survivors survived? Claire slid the gun from her leg rig, ejected the empty clip and loaded a fresh one. Then she waited.

To her surprise, a familiar face appeared from behind the rusting carcass of a forklift. His hair was dark and cut short, and his eyes were a familiar blue. It was her brother Chris. When Chris saw her, he said, "Claire! Shit," and he rushed toward her, throwing his knapsack down on the concrete and crouching beside her. He wore a thick thermal coat over dark green fatigues, and a black tactical vest labeled S.T.A.R.S above the left breast pocket. "Jesus," he said, inspecting her wound. "What happened to your ankle?"

"Bioweapon attacked me," said Claire. "God. Is it really you, Chris?"

He hugged her and said, "It's me, Claire." Chris turned to his knapsack and started to dig around the contents. He fished out a plastic medical kit, opened it, and took out a small suture kit. "It's pretty deep. I'm gonna stitch it." From the suture kit, Chris took out a pair of disposable gloves, which he put on, and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, which he used to sterilize the hemostat, the surgical scissors, and the needle.

"Rodrigo really did call you," she said, watching him. Chris used a small plastic syringe to irrigate the wound with antibacterial fluid, which made her wince, not so much from pain, but from the cold intrusion of the liquid. "What happened to him?" she asked, trying to keep her mind occupied, and off the uncomfortable cold liquid sensation.

Chris frowned. He started to cut away the jagged edges of the wound. "He's dead," he said, and once he had finished preparing the wound, Chris pushed the small curved needle through her flesh with the hemostat and started to stitch it shut. "At first I thought it was a trap. He contacted me on the phone and said he was with Umbrella. Mentioned he'd met you, and that you'd been taken to Antarctica."

Claire winced; the stitching hurt, but she'd always had a high tolerance for pain. "And you believed that?" she joked.

Chris smiled. "I've been dealing with Umbrella for three months, so yeah, I did. A facility in the middle of Antarctica isn't exactly hard to believe after the shit I've seen." He shook his head, continuing to push and pull the needle through her skin. Claire wondered if he had learned the skill from his military training, or if Rebecca had given him some pointers. "Rodrigo mentioned you'd given him my lighter," he added. "There was no way he could have known about it, if he hadn't actually met you."

"How did he die?" asked Claire. The question had been nagging at her, and it was a way to keep the conversation going, and her mind off the pain from the needle.

"He turned," said Chris without looking at her, concentrating on his work. "His sentences started becoming less and less coherent, and eventually became unintelligible. He'd dropped the phone—I'd heard it hit the ground—and then I'd heard shuffling noises, of something dragging its feet. And a sound like thunder in the background, a _boom_. Then the line went dead."

Claire knew the boom had come from the facility's self-destruction. And now she understood why Rodrigo hadn't come with her or Steve. But why had he needed the hemostat medicine? Had Rodrigo thought that, perhaps, he could beat the infection if he held on long enough? Or had it been because he had genuinely wanted to help them, to survive long enough to get them aboard that plane? Claire liked to think it was the latter. Rodrigo hadn't been like the other guards; he had had a conscience.

Chris finished suturing the wound. He packed the suture kit back inside the medical kit, and stowed that inside his knapsack. "Should be okay," he said. "I didn't see any signs of necrosis, which is good."

"Necrosis is never good," said Claire, and stood up. Her wound was still tender, but it was nothing she couldn't handle.

"No. It isn't," agreed Chris, and he smiled, slinging the knapsack over his shoulder. "When you'd said a bioweapon did this, I was worried you'd been exposed to the T-Virus. Infection is nasty from start to finish. First the wound goes necrotic, then the rest of you does, until skin is sliding wet off the fat and muscle—"

"Okay, gross. Enough of that. Listen," she said, half-limping beside him. She found if she didn't put too much weight on her ankle, she could keep a pretty good pace. "There's a boy here. Steve Burnside. He was a prisoner on Rockfort, but the thing that attacked me separated us."

"We'll find him," said Chris, reassuringly. "I have a chopper on the garage. There's a helipad up there. We're gonna get out of here, Claire. I promise."


	20. Interlude 11: Bloodhounds

Wesker had only visited the Antarctica facility once, when he had been sent by Spencer to negotiate a deal with Martin Bingham, Alexia's medical director. Martin had been a major driving force behind one of Umbrella's classified bio-experimentation programs, but Wesker had never been made privy to the specifics. He had never actually gotten to talk to Bingham about it either. Alexia had stonewalled him.

Wesker supposed it did not matter anymore. Spencer was old and feeble, and growing increasingly less relevant to Umbrella's operation, and Alexia had been irrelevant since 1983. If his employer hadn't been insistent on this retrieval job, Wesker wouldn't have wasted his time. Alexia was a has-been, and he doubted her T-Veronica research was even worth a quarter of the effort he had put into the mission.

His earpiece fuzzed. Wesker opened the communication line. Callahan spoke on the other end, though there was some slight interference. "Sir, we've encountered infected in the facility," he said. "Looks like the survivors from Rockfort."

"You're bothering me about this for a good reason, I hope," said Wesker, turning a corner, his footsteps ghosting along the corridor. "They're simple infected. Kill them."

"Actually, sir, we found some living," said Callahan, and Wesker could detect some uncertainty in his voice, as if Callahan was unsure of how to proceed. Conscience had been a lost concept on Wesker, and he always found it strange whenever he encountered people who still hadn't evolved beyond the inconvenient prison of moral indecisiveness. "They were holed up in the cafeteria. Three males, and two females. One of the females is injured."

Wesker said, "Kill them."

There was a pause on the line. Then Callahan said, "Affirmative," and cut the connection.

Wesker shook his head and opened the connection to what remained of Alpha Team. "Have you located Alexia yet, Captain?" he asked.

The Captain replied, through the fuzzy link, "No, though we've found something interesting, sir. Pinging our location. You'll want to see this." Then the Captain was gone. Wesker took out his PDA and glanced it over. They were a few floors below him.

Once Wesker had reached their location, he was ushered in by the Captain. It was some sort of laboratory. The machinery was outmoded; he had used similar technology in the 1980s, when he had worked in Arklay. At the center of the room, connected to the computer terminals by fat rubber cables and wires, was a large cryogenic tube, and though it wasn't big enough to accommodate a tyrant, it was certainly large enough to fit a human female.

Alpha had retrieved something from the tube too, and Wesker recognized Alfred, though Alfred was very, very dead. His skin had turned a blueish gray, and there was a bullet wound where his heart was. "So this is where Alexia was. And it seems she's woken up," he said, to Alfred. Wesker leaned down and patted his dead cold cheek, which felt like rigid porcelain under his fingertips. "Naughty boy, Alfred. If you had just told me..."

"Alexia was going to be moved to Rockfort," said the Captain, gesturing at the terminal, where one of his men had wired their PDA to data-sift. "We found a corresponding log in the databank. An automatic ping, of course. When HUNK came, he would have accepted the ping as confirmation, so Alfred would know he had been here. Standard protocol for most B.O.W retrievals. Employer pings you, you ping back and tell them you've got the goods."

"B.O.W retrieval?" said Wesker, expectantly.

"Alexia's not technically human anymore, sir," said the Captain. "She's classified as a tyrant. The databank contained cursory records of her research, and what we found is some scary shit, sir. But it wasn't enough to satisfy the mission parameters. Alexia probably kept detailed physical records instead for posterity."

"Yes, Alexia never did like computers," said Wesker. He shook his head. Then, "Peel what you can from the databanks. Did you find any T-Veronica samples?"

The Captain shook his head, the lights flowing across the plastic lenses of his filtration mask. "No, sir. From what we gleaned from the computers, Alexia only made one viable sample: herself."

"Then," said Wesker, smiling, "I suppose I will have to pay a visit to Alexia."

"We also found this, sir," said the Captain, handing him a photograph.

Wesker looked at the Polaroid, which was creased in some places, as if it had spent the years in someone's wallet. It showed the twins, who couldn't have been older than thirteen, and Grayson Harman, who was a young teenager. It had been taken outside the Antarctic mansion. He recognized the place from when he had visited the facility, fifteen years ago. Wesker flipped the photograph over, and it was dated Christmas 1983 in black marker. Alexia hadn't been a very sentimental person, as Wesker remembered her, and neither was her brother. Which meant that the photograph belonged to Grayson, who was a very sentimental person. It also meant that he was here.

Wesker grinned. He had been counting on that. "Thank you, Captain," he said. "It seems I still have my leverage."


	21. Part Two - Mad Love

They sat in one of the sitting rooms, where Alexander had often entertained guests, mostly suits from the Board of Directors who had come to tour the facility. It had been chilly in here, so Grayson had piled wood in the fireplace (there had been some wood on the log-rack, still wrapped in the plastic) and used the pages of a book on whaling scrimshaw for kindling. He found some nosing glasses in a nearby cabinet, then opened the bottle of the good bourbon he had found in his father's room.

Alexia could not really hold her liquor, but that did not surprise Grayson. Her only experience with alcohol had been at thirteen, when he'd stolen a bottle of whiskey from his father. They had gone down to her office and worked through the entire thing, and Alexia had spent that evening throwing her guts up, in the funny, inglorious way of a young teenager who had never touched booze before.

Right now, Alexia was struggling through her fourth glass, and it had taken her a long time to even reach number four. She had been steadily diluting the drinks with water, and now looked mildly nauseous, so Grayson dragged the waste-bin over and told her to throw up in there if she had to.

He was already feeling a good buzz: not shitfaced, but not very sober either—a comfortable in-between. He was hungry too, and luckily had found some canned beans in the Ashford's private kitchen. Alexia had only touched a little of it, and had complained it was terrible. He'd already gone through one can, and was working through a second.

"Alfred would be pissed," said Grayson, finishing another drink. The bottle was nearly empty. "Sitting around and drinking when there's zombies out there. And a kid who needs to die. But dammit, the bastard deserved a wake." There was an uncomfortable feeling in his chest, as if his emotions had suddenly collected in the cavity of his rib-cage and gotten lodged there.

Alexia finished her fourth drink, and bent over the waste-bin, like she was sure she'd throw it all back up. When nothing came, she said, "My poor brother didn't deserve to go like he did." In her current marinated state, Alexia was more emotive, more human, like the Alexia he'd known. "Shot in the back!" she declared. "That's how bloody Jesse James died. That's how a bloody _thug_ died, Grayson." She leaned against him, eyes glazed, staring in the direction of the fire.

Grayson slipped an arm around her. He finished the bourbon, straight from the bottle. Then chucked the bottle at the wall, and it shattered, the little pieces of it catching the firelight, glittering on the floorboards like rubies.

"We can't stay here," he said. "Not enough food in the facility to last longer than a few months, and that's if we stretch it. No animals we can hunt, because nothing lives this far fucking inland. The power-grid might last another year or two, give or take, and then we'll fucking freeze to death in this shithole. And if one of us gets hurt, there's no fucking doctor we can call, because the communications are shot. We're fucking alone." He heaved a sigh, feeling sulky. "Maybe Alfred was the lucky one, dying like that. He left a jet behind, but I don't know how to fly that fucking thing." Grayson paused, a sudden strange clarity hitting him: "You know you could have died if the auxiliary power went down? Your tube would have shorted, and then you'd have died. Alone. In the concrete dark. With nobody to hold a wake for you."

"You're certainly poetic when you're drunk, Grayson," said Alexia, closing her eyes. "Proper Shakespearean."

"I'm being serious, Alexia," said Grayson, staring at her. "We can't survive in this fucking place. Sooner we take care of Burnside, sooner we can figure a way off this godforsaken, ass-end-middle-of-fucking-nowhere, piece-of-shit facility." His head started to ache. "Isn't there an Australian observation base nearby? There used to be, unless it's been abandoned too."

"You sound worried. Don't be," said Alexia, with her usual cold confidence. She tipped her head back and kissed him, then said, "We're going to take care of Burnside, and then we're going to take care of Wesker."

"Wesker isn't here," said Grayson. The last time he had seen Wesker, it had been on Rockfort, and Rockfort was gone now.

"He's here," said Alexia, smiling.

It was an unsettling smile, the sort of smile he imagined belonging to female serial killers. But there was something about her smile that struck a deep, primal chord inside him, excited him on some daredevil genetic level—probably the part of the brain that had excited his caveman ancestors, when they had hunted dangerous predators, naked, with just their spears and bows.

Alexia stroked his cheek and kissed him again. "Don't worry, darling," she said, between kisses. She stopped, started to trail her lips along the line of his jugular. Her lips were warm and soft. "I'll take care of everything. I simply need you to follow my lead."

Grayson suddenly felt like putty. Alexia had always had a kind of beguiling effect on him, like every word she spoke was a powerful voodoo invocation. Alexia started to unbutton his shirt, and he couldn't decide if it was the booze that had loosened her up, or if it had been the fifteen years of cryo-storage. In one smooth motion, Alexia straddled him and started to undress. She removed the top of her dress, freeing her pale breasts, the nipples a rosy pink.

There was a sense of guilt then, sudden and sharp. "Should we really be doing this?" he asked. "We just held a wake for Alfred."

Alexia took his earlobe between her teeth and giggled, removing the last articles of her dress and tossing them aside. Naked now, Alexia started to work his zipper down. "My brother always wanted me to be happy," she murmured, and gently sucked at his mouth, an intense longing in the kiss. "Right now," she said, as she peeled her lips from his, her warm breath tickling his throat, "this is making me happy. Shut up and enjoy it." She took off his shoes, then his pants, and threw them aside. "You're problem, Grayson," she said, trailing kisses between his pectorals, and lower still, "is you talk too bloody much."

Sex with Alexia, he soon realized, was not a slow, affectionate affair. He decided Alexia was one of those women who could not get off unless she was hurting herself in some way, or hurting him in some way. She rode him like she'd gone several lifetimes without sex, rarely pausing between strokes, impaling herself on him with slick animal roughness and need. It had been difficult for him to acclimate, because Jill, his most recent failed relationship, had never been like that, and neither had the women he had dated before Jill.

Alexia was panting and sweating, rolling against him in the body-heated air of the room, a look somewhere between tortured pleasure and pain on her face. Grayson sat up, propped against the armrest of the couch, rocking powerfully between her wet thighs. She kissed him deeply, wrapped her long white legs around him, and told him, somewhere between the kisses and the moans, not to stop.

His orgasm came sudden and hot, blew his cognizance into a warm spray. He convulsed underneath her, and his body felt as if it had been reduced to liquid, like it would spill from the frame of his body if he moved too suddenly. Grayson lay there underneath her, panting, failing to remember the last time he'd had sex that great. Alexia rolled off him, pinned between his body and the backrest, her goose-pimpled skin slick with sweat.

Alexia traced the geometry of his muscles with her finger, and stopped just above his crotch. Her hair was a mess, like she'd just woken up after a rough night out. "It's strange," she said suddenly. "Waking up in 1998, when my last memories are from 1983." She frowned, then asked the question Grayson had dreaded she would ask, "Did you ever see another woman in those fifteen years, Grayson? Did you marry, like you'd planned to?"

"I was living in an apartment in Raccoon City." Grayson held her hand over his heart, her palm warm on his skin, the sound of his heartbeat thumping rhythmically in his ears. He smiled. "I was working out there as a bartender, and this woman Jill Valentine used to frequent the bar I tended at, a place called The Black Room. So we started talking."

Alexia scowled, her fingers digging tellingly into his skin. "Are you still with her?" she asked, coldly.

"No. Things didn't work out," said Grayson, automatically. His relationship with Jill had been complicated, and he'd realized, fairly recently, that he'd never actually loved her. She had been a distraction, a means to pass the time, a hobby. "The relationship ended a few months ago," he continued, and it was cathartic, Grayson decided, getting this shit off his chest. "We'd dated for two years, but I was hung up on you, and Jill didn't like that. Said she wouldn't play second fiddle to a dead woman. So I broke up with her over the phone."

"Do you regret how things turned out?" asked Alexia, watching him like a cat.

Grayson turned his head, brushing his thumb across her white cheek and kissing her, slow and sweet. Her lips were soft, and he wanted to kiss those lips forever. "Not at all," he said, and meant it. "I love _you_. I'd do _anything_ for you, and you know that."

Alexia kissed him. "I know," she said softly, stroking his cheek. "You've never been anything less than loyal to me and my brother, Grayson."

He smiled, admiring her face in contented silence. Fifteen years had turned Alexia's face into a work of art, a thing of delicate aristocratic angles. Then he said, because he couldn't really hold it in any longer, "God, you're fucking beautiful."

She chuckled. "You're not bad-looking yourself either, Grayson," she said, and grinned. "Time has been very," and she slipped her hand down, her fingers brushing his flaccid cock, " _kind_ to you."

Something moved beyond the door of the sitting room. It wasn't the shuffling they had heard outside the bedroom door earlier, but slow, cautious footsteps. Grayson grumbled. Alexia slid over him and stood, dressing quickly and quietly.

"We have a guest," she said.

"Wesker?" he asked, irritably.

"No. One of his men. I think his name is Callahan."

"How do you—"

"I know everything that happens in this facility, Grayson."


	22. Part Two - A Game of Twenty Questions

Callahan did not look much older than twenty-three. His skin was the color of his hair, which was sandy blond and shaved close to his skull. When Callahan saw Alexia, he said, "Shit," and swung the barrel of his automatic around, leveling it with her chest. But he never had the chance to pull the trigger. Something, which resembled the tentacle things Grayson had seen attack the snow truck, burst through the wall and ragdolled Callahan down the corridor. His head struck the wall with a loud _thud_ , and he did not get up.

Grayson pushed his hands deep inside the pockets of his pants and approached Callahan. Callahan had blacked, and he was bleeding from the back of his skull. "He's alive." Grayson crouched on his toes and rifled through the pockets of Callahan's tactical vest, finding a work ID in his wallet. H.C.F was printed there, below his name. In his photograph, Callahan looked as if, in that moment, he had regretted his career choice. "You should have backed out, good buddy," said Grayson aloud, tossing the ID aside. He flipped the body over and saw H.C.F decaled on the back of the Kevlar vest, just like Wesker's. "In the same merc outfit as our illustrious Albert Wesker," he said. "But I guess you already knew that, Miss I-Know-Everything-That-Happens-In-This-Facility."

"I did," said Alexia, standing behind him. She folded her arms across her chest, staring at Callahan. She looked thoughtful.

Grayson took out the gun Alfred had given him back on Rockfort and pressed the muzzle between Callahan's eyes. "Want me to kill him?" he asked, conversationally. Ever since Alexia had woken up, Grayson felt as if he'd become a physical extension, a blunt tool, of some invisible evil presence. That he'd tuned to some silent frequency that only the possessed and the insane could hear. "One bullet," said Grayson, "is all it takes."

Alexia purred, "Someone's developed a nasty streak," and slipped her arms around his neck. She smiled in his periphery, her chin resting on his shoulder. He smelled the rain and lilacs on her skin. "No. Don't kill him," she said. "Let's find out what dear Albert wants."

"I thought you knew everything," said Grayson, and smiled.

"Maybe not everything," said Alexia, tapping his nose with her finger. She stood up. "Let's go have a chat with Mr. Callahan, Grayson."

Grayson nodded, tucked the gun in the waistband of his pants and shouldered the body. Callahan wasn't a very big man, but his gear made carrying him a little awkward. Grayson disposed of his rifle, his tactical vest, his utility belt. But kept Callahan's pistol, which he gave to Alexia. "Never hurts to have a back-up plan," he said.

Alexia stared at the gun like it was a strange foreign thing. "I've never shot a gun," she said, and tossed it. "I don't need it."

Grayson solidly smacked her on the ass, grinning. "Fine," he said. "Whatever you say, Princess."

She looked indignant, and that didn't surprise him; Alexia had been raised among the prudish snobbery of the English aristocracy. But like the English aristocracy, Alexia was, deep-down, an insufferable pervert, even if she tried to put on coy, virginal airs. The indignation went away, and Alexia smiled, giving him a retaliatory and stinging smack on his ass. "You're lucky I like you, Grayson," she said wryly.

They went to Alexander's laboratory. It was where Alexia and Alfred had been created, where Alexander had used the preserved DNA of Veronica Ashford, Alexia's two-centuries-dead ancestor, to fill the genetic blanks of a donor egg he'd implanted inside a surrogate. The surrogate, Grayson had later found out from Alfred, had been some nobody from Norfolk who had been paid a hefty paycheck for the nine-month trouble. Alexia had had a hard time accepting the reality that she was, by all science fiction definitions, a clone, and she'd felt cheated because her "mother" had been nothing more than a biological prostitute. But Alexia had eventually gotten over it, and Grayson liked to think he'd helped her get over it by assuring her, over and over again, that she was no Pinocchio.

The laboratory was lit by cold fluorescent tubes. There were three rows of computer terminals, and highly technical-looking machines Grayson could not identify, which hummed and whirred and chugged around him in a loud hardware musical. Alexia told him to put Callahan in one of the chairs at the terminals, and Grayson did.

He didn't flinch when Alexia's tentacle things burst through the floor and restrained Callahan in the chair. "Think he's going to wake up soon?" asked Grayson, sitting on the terminal opposite Callahan. He reached into his pocket, coming up with a crumpled pack of Dunhills. He did not normally smoke, not anymore; but right now, he really wanted a cigarette. He thumbed the wheel of his silver flip-lighter, and lit one.

"Where did you get those?" asked Alexia, and she sounded like a very disappointed mother.

"Alfred bought me a carton, a few weeks ago," said Grayson. "I had this pack with me from Rockfort." He blew smoke, then shivered. "Jesus, it's fucking cold in here."

Alexia plucked the cigarette from his mouth and snapped it between her fingers, dropping the pieces on the scuffed tile. He had a sudden flashback: she was thirteen, and she'd taken the cigarette away from him, in that exact way, and had crushed it on Spencer's flagstone. "No," she said, frowning. She crossed her arms. "They do horrible things to your lungs. Do you want a bloody tracheotomy, Grayson?"

Grayson sighed. She really hadn't changed since they were kids. "You're not my damn mom," he said, watching the cinders smoldering on the tile.

"If I have to act like your mother to keep you from killing your lungs, I will," she said.

"My mother's dead," said Grayson. "So how about you act like that? You're giving me a headache."

"Did you seriously just tell me to go die?"

"No, I said _act_ like your dead," he said. "Quiet time, Alexia. _Shh_."

Alexia took the pack of cigarettes from his pocket with the deftness of a professional pick-pocket. She emptied the contents and crushed the cigarettes under the heel of her shoe, grinding the tobacco into a black paste on the floor. She handed the empty pack back and gave him a look, which said: _go ahead, say something._ Grayson didn't say anything.

Callahan groaned and lifted his head. When he saw Alexia, his expression said: _I regret my career choice_. Callahan struggled against the vines, and the thorns tore deeply at his skin until he bled, and was in too much pain to move anymore. "You're Alexia Ashford," said Callahan, and his voice was fear-shaky. Fat beads of sweat rolled down his face. "Shit," he said. "Why me?"

"Yes, why you?" said Alexia sardonically, and she stroked Callahan's head in a way that made Grayson think of Blofeld and his stupid cat. Then Alexia sat on the terminal beside Callahan and crossed her legs, one of the tentacles curling around her finger, like a pet giving its master attention. "Poor boy," she added, and she smiled emptily. "Just happened to stumble outside the room _I_ was inside."

"The vines," said Callahan, hanging his head. "You led me there, didn't you? Blocked off the doors... Funneled me."

"Of course, I did," said Alexia, still smiling. "You're the weakest link in the chain, my friend." She patted Callahan's head. "I needed information, and was sure you'd be accommodating." Alexia coaxed the tentacle away from her finger, and it wrapped around Callahan's neck, bloodying his throat. "Talk," she said, inspecting her nails.

Grayson expected some kind of struggle, like in the movies, where the bad guy would spit on the cop and tell him to go fuck himself, he wouldn't tell him anything, and that his guys were already planning the next heist. But nothing like that happened. Callahan immediately broke, and he said, "Anything. I'll tell you anything, Alexia. This job isn't fucking worth dying for."

"See? We're already off to a good start," said Alexia. Then, "Why is Albert Wesker here? Let's start there."

"Wesker's heading our mission," said Callahan, and the tentacle around his throat eased. "We're with the H.C.F, the Hive/Host Capture Force. Our employer sent us to retrieve a sample of the T-Veronica, to bring you to him—" Callahan shook his head, sweating and practically hyperventilating—" _Shit_."

"That's it? Your employer just wanted to chit-chat about my research?" said Alexia, visibly annoyed. She rolled her eyes, waved her hand, and the tentacle tightened around Callahan's throat again. A wet gurgle escaped him. "Who's your employer?" she asked, and yawned. Alexia hopped off the terminal and paced in front of Callahan. "There must be something else they're after, other than myself."

"He is," Callahan choked out, and the tentacle eased again. "His name is Martin Bingham, an Umbrella researcher." Alexia stopped pacing and stared at Callahan, who withered. "There was a secondary objective he kept from Wesker," he quickly added. "My team was tasked with retrieving something Bingham called his prototype, his _magnum opus_. He said it was here, and that you'd know where to find it." Callahan seemed to be on the verge of tears, or on the verge of pissing his pants, or perhaps on the verge of both. "That's all I fucking know, Alexia. I swear." He looked at her. "Please, let me go. I won't say anything. If Wesker found out I talked, he'd kill me himself." His voice cracked, and then Callahan said, as if he was begging the devil Himself not to kill him, "I've got a wife back in the States, Alexia. We just got married. Please, don't kill me. This shit isn't worth it. The money isn't fucking worth it."

Alexia conjured a plastic syringe in her hand, and it was filled with something clear. It made Grayson think of something he'd read once in a Burroughs' novel, who had described a hot shot: a syringe filled with strychnine, which was passed to junkies who were funneling information to the law. "Of course not," said Alexia, and smiled meaninglessly, pushing the needle into the vein on Callahan's arm.

Callahan screamed, asked her what the fuck she'd done, but Alexia ignored him. Then Callahan started writhing in the chair as if he was in the throes of a particularly powerful seizure. Grayson heard bones snapping, saw them shifting and re-arranging under Callahan's skin like some anatomical jig-saw puzzle, and into a large and vaguely humanoid shape. His skin turned the exact shade of a corpse that had sat too long in the water, and his veins swelled, turned black. Callahan's eyes rolled back into his skull, and vomit trickled from his mouth, spilling onto his fatigues. The convulsions became steadily more violent, until he shook in his seat like a man in the electric chair.

Grayson watched the entire thing with interest, waiting for something to happen. Callahan ripped at the vines with his teeth, which had become shark-like, a mouth that belonged on a juvenile megalodon. Once he saw those teeth, Grayson decided that the show had gone on long enough, and took out his gun, shooting Callahan between the eyes.

What was left of Callahan's brain pollocked the terminal behind him, a dark spatter of blood on the monitor. "Show's over," said Grayson, hopping off the terminal. "Callahan said Bingham hired him. I heard that right, right?"

Alexia nodded. "That's what Callahan said."

"What's this shit about a prototype?" asked Grayson, standing beside her. When Callahan's body twitched, Grayson shot three more times, and the body stopped moving entirely. Then put the gun away.

There was a sudden seriousness on Alexia's face, which became worry, then hesitation. "Do you remember when you were fifteen, Grayson? Bingham had conducted a series of tests on you." She looked at him, her mouth a thin, hard line.

"Yeah. Routine check-ups, right?" he said. "That's what your dad said. Everyone even tangentially involved with Umbrella had to go through that shit." Grayson frowned. "Why does Bingham want you?"

"My father lied to you," said Alexia, turning to fully face him. "Bingham was involved in Project Wesker." She paused for a long time. "Dr. Wesker was your grandfather, Grayson. You were initially a candidate for Project Wesker, and my father was the one who had vouched for your candidacy. I contested your eligibility. The prototype? It's inside you."


	23. Interlude 12: Almost

Claire wasn't sure where they were, just that it was deep in the facility, and it was dark. The corridor smelled of old concrete and paint, and it was partially illuminated, at random intervals, by sodium tubes. At times, the corridor would slope sharply down, and they had to be careful on those slopes; a water pipe-line must have broken somewhere, and parts of the hallway were black-iced.

They hadn't run into too many zombies down here. Either, Claire guessed, the infected hadn't wandered this far down, or there hadn't been many survivors who had made it out of Rockfort.

"You've been really quiet," said Chris, beside her. Claire was glad he was there; his presence was the eye of the storm. "If you're worried about Steve, I promise, he's gonna be okay." He smiled at her. "You know I keep my promises to you, Goob."

Goob had been what her father had called her, before he had died. The name brought an involuntary smile to her face. "I've just been thinking, I guess," she said, and she had been thinking. She had been thinking since the snow truck wreckage, when Claire had been sure she would die. "About Steve, and if he's okay." Claire frowned and continued, "About whether or not we're ever going to get out of here. Just four months ago, I was at a bonfire on Lake Matoskah, listening to Queen and drinking shitty beer with my friends, wondering how the fall semester would go. Now I'm in Antarctica, and unsure if I'll ever get to have moments like that again."

"I'm gonna get you out of here," said Chris, and squeezed her shoulder reassuringly. He carefully made his way down a slope, slick with black ice. Once they had safely gotten past the ice, Chris spoke. "You're gonna be back in the States, in time for the Spring semester, and Steve will be able to finish off his senior year. You're both gonna go back to your lives. You gotta trust me, Goob."

"I always trust you," said Claire, and meant it. The only time her brother had ever steered her wrong was when he'd played practical jokes on her, as older brothers often did. Claire had reasoned it was something congenital, a hereditary addiction-proneness like alcoholism, which all older brothers seemed to share. Like when he had pushed her into her aunt's pool, in her clothes, at a family barbecue last year. "Most days," she added, grinning.

"You're still mad about the pool thing?" he joked. "Come on. You provided some quality entertainment for our cousins."

"It was pretty funny," she agreed.

"How's your ankle holding up?"

"It's good. Stings a bit, but it's okay. Thanks again for that, Chris."

"What are brothers for, if not for suturing their sister's disgusting flesh-wounds?"

Eventually, they came to a part of the facility that resembled a cell-block in a prison. Here, the concrete corridor was lit by more sodium tubes, which gave the very specific impression of a Freddy Kruger nightmare. There were bulky rust-flecked metal doors with slots, which allowed them to look inside the cells. All of them were empty, and Claire guessed this had been where Umbrella had kept their subjects. At the end of the hallway, they found Steve in one of the cells.

"I'm guessing that's our man," said Chris, unlatching the heavy bar on the door. He pulled the door, but it barely budged.

"Must be rusted as shit," said Claire, and helped him. The thing really was stuck. After a few more tries, they eventually got it open, the metal scraping against concrete. She rushed inside (or had tried to rush anyway, but her ankle was still sore from the stitches, so she half hobbled, half ran) and fell to her knees in front of Steve, hugging him. "Hey, Steve." Claire smiled. "My brother's here. Rodrigo came through for us. We're going to get out of here."

The cell was a featureless concrete room, parts of it black-stained, a pervasive reek of piss in the air. Steve was pretty banged up. His clothes were torn from the thorns on the vine things, and he had several lacerations on his arms, legs, and face. There was a particularly bad one above his eye, probably where the vine thing had struck him. His left eye was swollen shut, but when he saw her, Steve smiled, blood between the cracks of his teeth. "Holy shit," he said, shakily. "I didn't think you'd ever find me."

"Hey, man," said Chris, getting Steve around the middle and helping him to his feet. "My name's Chris Redfield. My little sister's told me a lot about you."

"All good things, I hope," said Steve, with a weak laugh.

"All good things," said Chris, and nodded. They left the cell and headed down the corridor.

They were heading up, and Chris warned Steve of the black ice. Claire wanted to talk to Steve, but decided it was best not to push him too hard. She wasn't sure what sort of damage the vine things had done to him when they had dragged Steve from the snow truck wreckage, and she didn't want to potentially exacerbate any existing injuries. Her brother, however, didn't seem to share her reservations. Chris was chatting to Steve, and Claire guessed it was because he wanted to keep Steve awake, to keep his brain stimulated, and because Chris wanted Steve not to worry, it was okay, they were there now.

"How'd you get here anyway, Steve?" asked Chris. "You can just give me a simple answer."

"Cell, or Antarctica?" asked Steve.

"Both, I guess."

"Dad stole information from Umbrella and got locked up on Rockfort," said Steve, somewhat straining to talk. "Tentacle just... dragged me from the wreckage. Locked me up here. Crazy lady came and said she had plans."

Claire cut in. "Crazy lady?"

"It was Alexia," said Steve. "The woman from the portrait. She's alive, Claire. God, she's fucking alive."

"No. Alexia is dead. Do you mean Alfred?" asked Claire. "Did Alfred survive?"

Steve slowly shook his head. "It wasn't Alfred. It was really Alexia," he said, like he was peeling the words off his tongue. "If you thought her brother was bad, this bitch is a complete fucking psycho. A complete fucking psycho with psychic fucking powers, Claire."

"Psychic powers?" said Chris, looking at him. They stepped into the lift they had taken from the ground-level of the facility and rode it up. It rumbled on its ancient pulley.

"The crazy bitch controls those fucking tentacles," said Steve. "With her fucking _mind_ , man. When Alexia came to the cell, she made them go away with a wave of her fucking hand. Said she'd be back."

"Alexia's some kind of bio-weapon?" asked Chris, looking at Claire.

"I guess so," said Claire, remembering the things she had fought in Raccoon City, and the thing Umbrella had called Mr. X. The idea of something like Mr. X being able to mind-control razor-sharp tentacles sat in her stomach like food poisoning. Had Alexia gone the way of Birkin, all in the pursuit of power? Or did she have a bigger plan? She remembered coming across a file on Rockfort, and in it had been a newspaper clipping about Alexia, and how she had been ten-years-old, and had graduated university. Then there was the graduation photograph she had found in Alexia's room... Someone that smart wouldn't have pulled a desperate move like Birkin. "Was Harman with her?" asked Claire.

"Who's Harman?" said Chris. They got out of the lift, and stood in the main atrium now, in the gray glow of the arctic day, which filtered through the dirty slabs of the dome-glass.

"Harman was Alfred's butler. I guess he's Alexia's butler now," said Claire, shivering. She pulled the hood of her thermal jacket up, her breath steaming in the cold air. Snow crunched under her boots as she walked, a steady curtain of it coming down around them, from the empty panes in the dome-glass. "I don't think he's as crazy as Alexia. He had a chance to kill us before, and he didn't."

Steve shivered violently beside her. He still had his thermal gear, but it had holes in it now. Chris held him closer, trying to keep him warm, and Claire moved closer too, hoping that would be enough until they were somewhere where the heating system still worked. "N-no way," said Steve, his teeth chattering. "The g-guy's a freak. Th-there's something off about him. And n-now that Alexia's back from the dead, who k-knows how that's a-affected him."

"How would that affect him?" asked Chris, and they started toward the doors, which led back out into the garage, where Chris had found her.

"Harman's obsessed with Alexia," said Claire, like she was reciting a well-known fact. "And I mean _obsessed_. Like the kind of guy who would keep a tuft of her hair in a jar, and probably has a shrine of her in his closet. But he seemed like an okay guy, despite that."

"Was this love thing unrequited?" asked Chris.

"I don't think so," said Claire, and shook her head. "Back on Rockfort, I found this video. Old Betacam footage. Grayson—that's Harman's first name—and Alexia were kids in it, and she definitely seemed to love him. It was the way she looked at him, Chris. Like how grandma looks at grandpa. But it was a look with some serious possessiveness in it."

"Only guy who ever wanted to lay her, probably," said Steve, and quietly laughed.

"That's dangerous," said Chris, and Claire knew from his tone that he meant that, and wasn't trying to be funny. "A possessive woman is a dangerous woman, Claire—" a smile flashed on his face—"If you knew about my ex. Jesus." Then he said, very seriously, "A psychopath with something to lose is a very precarious time-bomb. They get rash when the thing they value's put in any kind of perceivable danger. They become explosively unpredictable. And mix a crazy virus into that shit? A sentient bio-weapon? This is bad, Claire. We're gonna have to go at this real careful."

When they got inside the garage and took the stairs up to the roof, they froze. The chopper Chris had brought in was in flames, and one of Alexia's tentacles was retreating, snake-like, across the helipad, toward the edge of the building.

"How did she—" Before Chris could finish his sentence, the tentacle whipped around and slammed into him, and he skidded across the icy rooftop.

Claire shot, but missed, swept off her feet by another tentacle that had blind-sided her. Then she heard Steve screaming, being dragged away by the thing. He clawed at the ground until his fingers were bloody. Claire dove for him, but the tentacle slammed into her stomach, and she cartwheeled through the air and hit the concrete head-first, sure her neck had been broken. She was stunned and couldn't move; her spine seemed to oscillate with pain, and she was numb for a few moments.

When she had started getting the feeling back in her neck, Steve was already gone; though she could still hear him screaming on the wind.


	24. Part Two - The Experiments

Alexia said they were going to see Steve. He could not precisely remember what wing they were in, and wasn't even sure if he had been here before. There were automatic doors, the kind with magnetic locks, though they did not go into any of them. He guessed they were laboratories; there was a pervasive tang of antiseptic in the air, of hospitals and of sick things.

Grayson wanted to ask Alexia more about Project Wesker. He felt like a man who knew he was terminally sick, but did not want to hear the diagnosis because it scared him, and left little room for doubt, for hope. But the thought gnawed...

"You said the prototype was inside me," he said. "That it had something to do with the tests Bingham conducted."

Alexia walked beside him, and did not immediately answer. Their footsteps made lonely noises in the concrete dark."You might recall an injection," she began. "A flu shot, perhaps. I'm sure Bingham had an entire story for it." She shook her blonde head, her fragile features composed in a look of conversational vacancy. "It was a virus, Grayson. One I'd helped develop." Alexia looked ashamed, and then said, "You were slated to be the fourteenth candidate in Project Wesker. That contract my father told you to sign, the one that supposedly gave Bingham consent to run routine tests on you? It was bullshit, Grayson. That paper essentially stated you gave Umbrella your permission for 'experimental invasive procedures'. Much like a waiver one might sign if they're entering an experimental program for specialized treatment for something, say, like cancer. It was to cover their ass should legal issues arise."

"Would that even be valid in court? I was a minor at the time," he said.

"Co-signed. By your father."

Grayson suddenly felt very stupid, and remembered why he had hated Alexander. He had only been fifteen-years-old at the time. Alexander had taken advantage of his age, and of his love for Alexia. Alexander had told him that, if he had not signed that paper, he would have had to send his father and him back to Rockfort, which would have taken him far away from Alexia.

"I didn't know the virus was for you," said Alexia, and held his hand, squeezing. They stopped walking. Alexia stepped in front of him, holding both his hands now. "I was young at the time, Grayson. It was ego." She frowned. "The initial goal of the program was to create superhumans. Spencer is growing older, beginning to realize his mortality. Back in 1983, he came to me with a proposition: he would give me the Antarctica facility, if I helped Bingham with his research in Project Wesker. Bingham was a brilliant scientist, but needed my brain to work the kinks out of his work. And I did. I didn't find out about your circumstances until after it had happened. I was _furious_. I marched to the Board of Directors and contested your eligibility. It took time, but I managed to convince them that Bingham had been falsifying his reports. So the Board pulled you from the program."

"What am I then? Some kind of super-intelligent zombie, or something?" he asked, plaintively. "Is this shit going to kill me?"

Alexia looked searchingly at him, smiling. "The virus didn't have any adverse effects," she said, and shook her head. "In fact, it proved beneficial. It's why I never brought it up to you when we were children." He knew she was not lying; Alexia had very specific body-language whenever she lied. But she was motionless. "Your body _adapted_ it, Grayson," she added, her smile widening. "Have you ever wondered why, whenever you get hurt, your recovery period is supernatural? Have you ever wondered why you rarely, if ever, get sick? It's the prototype."

He had never really given it much thought; but now that Alexia had mentioned it, Grayson found himself remembering several instances in which he should have died: when he had fallen from a ladder after he had finished fixing the shingles on the Rockfort mansion's roof, and had landed on his head; when he had been shivved by a prisoner on one of his out-and-abouts with Alfred; when Wesker had fought him in the mansion foyer, and Grayson had survived the fight with just a few cuts and bruises. "Why am I not like Albert then?" he asked. "If we're part of the same program."

"Not like Albert?" asked Alexia, raising an eyebrow. She gave him an expectant look that said: _go on_.

"He didn't move like a normal human," said Grayson, trying to put it into words. "The guy moved fast. You said Project Wesker was conceived as a means to create superhumans, right?"

"I wasn't aware Albert had been infected with anything," said Alexia, and seemed genuinely surprised. "Perhaps that happened years after the initial wave of the program? If he was infected, it would have been with the crude progenitor strains that Umbrella used in the Lisa Trevor experiments, back in the early 60s. He would have become a monster."

"Why me?" he asked, as they turned a corner, went down the hall, and stepped into a lift. Grayson stared at his reflection in the chrome. He looked like someone who belonged in a 1960s fashion catalog.

"Who knows?" said Alexia, as the lift hummed around them. "Perhaps you were just a good physiological match, Grayson? You were in the right age-group, and healthy."

"Why not you? You were in the same age-group, and would probably make a better Wesker than I would. Even if I'm _technically_ already a Wesker, by blood and otherwise." Harman had been his grandmother's surname; his father had told him that his grandfather—who, until Alexia had told him, Grayson did not know was Martin Wesker—had skipped out on them when his father had been a baby. It was almost unreal, he decided; for years, he had thought he was a Harman, but was in fact a Wesker. He felt as if he had regained a small lost piece of himself, a tiny genetic fragment.

"Umbrella needed me as a scientist," said Alexia. The lift stopped, and they stepped out. "Not a guinea pig. I wouldn't have been very useful on an op-slab."

As they walked, they talked about music and movies. Grayson missed talking music and movies with Alexia. When she had not been buried in her research, they would often listen to albums in her room, or they would watch movies on the wood-panel television in his bedroom, on the VCR Alfred had bought him for his fourteenth birthday. Alexia had already been big into music before he had even started talking to her about it, and she had gotten him into jazz, and he had gotten her into movies. Those moments, when Alexia had been able to be a kid, had been rare, and were his favorite memories.

They arrived at the end of the corridor, at a large rusted door. There were identical doors like that here, and he guessed this had been storage space for Umbrella's creepy-crawlies. Grayson peeked into one of the doors—they had these little slots he could look through—and could see bodies there, or what had been left of them. Mostly bones.

Alexia opened the large rusted door by pulling a latch. It squealed, and the sound resonated in the corridor for several minutes, then dissolved into tomb-silence. Inside the cell was Steve, and he looked seriously banged up, as if he had been put through a wood-chipper, then had spent several rounds getting clobbered in a UFC heavyweight match. He was all bruises and cuts, his thermal gear torn, and he had the look of someone who had given up on everything.

"You brought me back here, you crazy bitch?" said Steve, in a weak voice.

"It's so cozy down here, don't you think?" said Alexia, stepping inside. "This time, Redfield isn't coming to save you." She shut the door behind her and smiled meaninglessly. "And neither is her brother."

The cell was a featureless black-stained concrete room, and stank of stale piss. Grayson imagined it was the piss of several prisoners, as they had waited to die in the dark. The room was wide enough for him and Alexia to stand abreast, though the roof sort of sloped, and Grayson had to bend slightly to stand in there. "You killed Alfred," he said, surprised by the coldness in his voice. "And you're going to pay for that, Steve."

"That guy was a fucking nut. He would have killed us," said Steve, watching them with tired eyes. "I did the world a favor." He looked at Grayson. "Guess Claire had you wrong. Angel was right. So was Bob. You're a fucking headcase too, Harman."

"You have to be a certain kind of guy to get along with the Ashfords," said Grayson, well aware of the things the prisoners had said. He had never bothered defending himself against the accusations, or the rumors. He was crazy, deep down, and Grayson knew that. "All that matters is Alexia now, kid. You don't matter. Claire doesn't matter. None of you fucking matter."

"Yeah, I'll bet," said Steve, and laughed, blood dribbling over his chin. "Gotta be insane to stick your dick in a crazy bitch like Alexia. Hope she's a good lay, Harman. She looks like she's probably into some real kinky shit." Steve started laughing a little harder, as though he had finally snapped, had broken under the pain-weight. Steve knew he was going to die, and no longer cared. "Come on, Alexia. You into riding crops, maybe? Flails? Bet you want Harman to slap your face when he's cock-deep."

Grayson actually found Steve's commentary pretty funny, but Alexia did not share his sense of humor. She was grinding her teeth and scowling, her eyes like beads of ice. She struck Steve, and his head banged against the wall, so hard Grayson heard his skull crack. But Steve was still laughing, even while the blood trickled down his face. "Your brother was a fucking pervert too," he said, mad-grinning. "You know he fucking dressed up like you? Pretended he was you? Bet he fucked Harman too. How about it, Grayson? You fuck Alfred while he wore the dress?"

Grayson yanked Steve up by his jacket and slammed him against the wall, pinning him there. "Say one more thing about Alfred—" he took out his gun and pushed the muzzle between Steve's eyes—"and I blow your fucking brains out."

Steve laughed. "Oh? I hit a chord, Harman? Too bad it wasn't Alexia I fucking shot. Would have loved to see your face."

That hit Grayson hard, and before he was even conscious of what he was doing, he started beating Steve over the head with his pistol. He kept beating and beating him until the laughing stopped, and Steve was barely conscious, or perhaps half-dead. Grayson would have clobbered him to death if Alexia had not stopped him. "Don't kill him like this," she said, grabbing him by the wrist. "I have a plan for him. Something more painful."

Grayson stared at his hand. Steve's blood was spattered there, and on the grip of the gun. "Can I shoot him in the knee, at least?" he asked. "It's supposed to be painful. Just one knee, Alexia."

"I suppose," she said, waving her hand dismissively.

Grayson had once read somewhere that being shot in the knee was one of the most painful places to be shot. So he shot Steve in the knee, who howled and writhed on the ground, clutching what was left of his kneecap, blood seeping through the fabric of his pants, and through his fingers. "Not so funny now, is it?" asked Grayson, tucking the gun into the waistband of his pants, listening to Steve sniveling and cursing in the cell-dark. "What now, Alexia?"

"The fun begins," said Alexia, kissing him. She produced a plastic syringe, like the one he had seen her use on Callahan, and tapped the air bubbles out of the tube. "Now hold him still, Grayson."


	25. Interlude 13: Part Two End - A Tomb

It took a moment for Claire to recover from her collision with the ground. It reminded her of the pain she had felt when she had dived into her family's pool at ten-years-old, and had hit her head on the bottom of it. She remembered how the pain had oscillated up her spine, resonating there, and how nauseous she had felt when Chris had fished her from the water and laid her on the lounge chair, the June sun burning in her eyes...

But her neck wasn't broken, and that was obviously a good thing. Claire pushed herself to her feet, her body aching, and half-limped toward Chris, who was still sprawled face-down on the snow-covered concrete. "Chris?" she said, her breath turning to white clouds in the air. Her lips were cracked and cold. "Chris, you okay?"

Chris moved, which relieved her. He groaned and pushed himself to his knees. He had a nice deep bruise on his forehead, above his right eye, where his head had struck the ground. But he seemed okay. "I'm okay," he assured her, wincing. Chris went to open his knapsack, but realized he did not have it anymore.

"Alexia must have knocked it off the fucking helipad," said Claire, and helped him up.

"Shit. I had pain-killers in there," he said, and he cursed again, but under his breath. Chris shook his head. "No point searching for it. It's too cold out here. She might have even taken it." Chris stared at the burning wreckage of the chopper, looking morose. The flames sputtered and popped, the chemical tang of burnt fuel and machine parts filling the air. The pillar of black smoke swayed and fluttered in snowy gray gusts of arctic wind. "That was our only way out," he added, plaintively.

The thought of dying scared her. She was always told that it was worse to die alone, but she realized now that that was bullshit, and that dying alone, or dying with others, did not change anything. They were still dying. If she wasn't so tired, Claire would have cried. She wanted to, but could not find the energy to do it. "We need to find Steve," she said.

"Hey, cut that out," said Chris, and he slipped his arm around her, guiding her past the wreckage, and down the stairs into the garage. "We'll figure something out. You know I always manage." They stepped into the cold grayness of the hangar, the smell of rust and forgotten things hitting her nostrils. "That guy Alfred. Steve mentioned him. And I heard you mention him when I'd initially found you in here..."

It hit her then. Claire looked at Chris. "Alfred followed us here," she said, louder than she had intended. She lowered her voice. She doubted the zombies had found their way inside the hangar, but she could not be sure, so she decided to play it safe. "He _flew_ here. In a jet."

"Hey, look," said Chris, grinning. "There's our silver-lining, Goob. I can fly it."

"Thank you, Air Force," said Claire, feeling relieved. Suddenly, things seemed so much brighter. They were riding into the sunset, the last survivors of a John Carpenter film. "I doubt Alexia destroyed it," she continued. "The jet's her only way out of here."

"You sure?" asked Chris, as they walked side by side.

Claire nodded. "I'm sure." They walked on. Then she said, "Steve was the one who killed Alfred." She looked at Chris. "That's why Alexia's targeting him."

Chris seemed to consider something. Then, "That explains why she's only been half-heartedly attacking us. Her beef is with Steve." He shook his head, his expression uncharacteristically grave. "Which means we have to hustle. Steve's running on a short clock."

Claire hustled as fast as her busted ankle would let her, which was at a steady hobble. They made their way down into the main atrium. It was eerily silent, and Claire could not help but feel as if something very bad was about to happen. "You think Alexia took him back down to the cell?" she asked, making her way across the snowdrifts that had accumulated at the bottom of the atrium.

"Maybe," said Chris, and he frowned. "But she could have taken him anywhere. This facility is huge."

There was a sudden noise, from deeper in the facility, high above. It sounded like gunshots: the steady _pop-pop-pop_ of automatics. "Did you hear that?" said Claire, looking up. She did not see anyone—just the gray sky beyond the broken dome-glass, the snowflakes caking her eyelashes. "You think it's survivors from Rockfort?"

"Could be, but that shit sounds military-grade," said Chris.

"Rockfort had a paramilitary," said Claire. "Maybe they took rifles off the guards?"

"Maybe," said Chris, though he did not sound convinced.

Another sound, and this time, it was something like a roar. It was the sort of roar Claire imagined might have belonged to dinosaurs. It seemed to vibrate in the air at some loud primordial frequency, and it made her ears pop, similar to the effect of a jet as it lifted into the air...

 _Bang_. Claire saw something tumble over the railing, and realized it was a man in black fatigues and Kevlar gear, his face hidden by a goggled balaclava. The man hit the ground with a wet noise, his chest opened, showing torn muscle and fat, and part of his rib-cage, as if some enormous claw had ripped through him. The crumpled remnant of a white-painted fire door fell beside the corpse; it looked as if it had literally been ripped off its hinges.

"That Harman guy you mentioned isn't a bioweapon, right?" asked Chris, taking out his gun. Since his knapsack was gone, all he had was his Glock, and his S.T.A.R.S-issue knife, which was sheathed on his shoulder.

Claire took the dead man's rifle, and scrounged what ammunition she could from his utility belt. His wound smelled necrotic, of spoiled meat and blood-tang. "Not that I know of," she said, loading the gun with a fresh clip. "But fuck, what do I know when it comes to Umbrella? Who's the dead guy anyway?"

Chris turned the body over. H.C.F was decaled on the back of the dead man's bulky tactical vest. Chris did not seem to recognize the name. "Never seen this logo before," he said. "Maybe it's one of Umbrella's clean-up details?"

There was another roar, and it was louder this time, closer. Claire looked up, saw something big and green moving along the upper-ring of the atrium. Whatever it was, the thing vaguely resembled Killer Croc. She heard screams, saw more bodies flung from the railing, hitting the snowdrifts with visceral noises. Then the Killer Croc-thing leaped over the railing and landed a few feet from them, the impact of its bulk hitting the snowy concrete making the ground shake. Claire went sideways, and the thing loomed over her, gore-chunks dripping from between its long saber-teeth.

Claire recognized the monster then, and her entire body went dead-cold, then completely numb. It was Steve. The Steve-thing watched them with bright red eyes, the pupils thin vertical slits. "Steve," she said, her chest hurting, pain unfolding between her breasts like a barbed lotus flower. "What did Alexia do to you?" She already knew what Alexia had done, but had said it anyway. Alexia had done exactly what William Birkin had done. Exactly what every Umbrella scientist had ever done. She had experimented.

The Steve-thing did not seem to recognize her. He charged like a mad bull. Chris pushed her out of the way and said, "Look. It isn't Steve anymore." He scrambled to his feet and pulled her up by her jacket, and they were running harum-scarum across the atrium, the Steve-thing right on their asses.

They were just about through a door when something made them go sideways. She heard her brother scream, " _Claire_!" and then she was dangling several feet above the snowdrifts and concrete, and realized it had been one of Alexia's tentacles, and it was wrapped around her, an anaconda slowly squeezing the life from its prey. Claire could feel the thorns digging into her meat, and they hurt deeply and made her bleed. On some level, she was okay with dying now. Steve was gone, and Chris and her were never going to escape the Antarctic anyway, not while Alexia was still alive and still had a grudge—still had company secrets she did not want exposed.

The Steve-thing reached for her with its rake-like claws, and Claire closed her eyes, waiting for that sudden blackness she had always imagined that happened in death. There would be no tunnel of light, no angels. There would only be nothing. She remembered something then that she had read in a philosophy book once. Epicurus had said: _Death is nothing to us_.

But the nothingness never came. The Steve-thing made a noise like a scrape, which vaguely sounded like her name, and tried to tear the tentacle apart. When that proved ineffective, the Steve-thing started to bite and gnaw the thing until it was too weak to hold her. Claire fell and hit the snow. She watched the tentacle snap around and impale the Steve-creature's stomach, pinning him to the wall on the other side of the atrium.

Steve-thing shrank and became something human and pathetic now, naked skin the color of corpses, and the tentacle slithered away like a wounded snake, retreating into a crack in the wall behind her. Claire scrambled toward him, even though her ankle still hurt deeply, and she was bleeding where the thorns had dug into her flesh, and threw herself down beside him.

Chris stood behind her and said, "Tried to get a clear shot. Fucking thing knocked me down." He stared at Steve, and Claire could see that look in his eyes which said: _he isn't going to make it_. It had been the exact look Chris had worn in the hospital room as their father had slowly died, then had flat-lined in the middle of the night.

Steve looked just like her father had, before her father had died. His skin was white, and his eyes had that heavy, unfocused look of a person who was trying very hard to cling to life, but finding it enormously difficult. He smiled weakly, his blood-stained fingers clutching his stomach, which was nothing more than a pulpy necrotic hole now. "Sorry you gotta see me like this," he said, in typical Steve fashion.

"Stop talking. We have a way out, Steve. You just have to hold on," said Claire.

Steve shook his head. "We both know I'm not getting out of here alive, Claire." He touched her face, and his fingers were like cool porcelain on her cheek, and left wet blood there. "Just make that bitch pay. Do it for me, for everyone who's gonna suffer if she gets off this ice-cube."

Claire nodded, felt a hot tear slide down her cheek.

"Kill Harman too," he said. "He... guy pistol-whipped me. Shot my knee out. Pinned me down while Alexia injected me with her fucking virus." He shook his head, and it seemed to take a physical toll on him, as if shaking his head had been the hardest trick in the world. "Her virus patched the damage, but... can't really say this is a better trade-off."

"Now is _not_ the time for fucking jokes, Steve," said Claire, and she started crying: hard, lurching sobs. Chris squeezed her shoulder, but it did nothing for her, just as it had done nothing for her when their father had died. "I'm so sorry we didn't reach you in time, Steve."

"You tried," said Steve, and he kissed her.

They stayed like that for a long time, kissing in the silent daylight. Then Steve's chest became still. His eyes emptied, and looked artificial now in his pale dead face which, in death, appeared more like a mask, like something grown from a collagen culture for skin-grafts. Steve looked like a wax doll now, an inert animatronic, and her father had looked that way too. "Alexia," she said finally, "is going to pay, Chris. And so is Harman."

"You take some time," said Chris, rubbing her back. He glanced at the dead bodies, which were littered around them, each one dressed in black fatigues and Kevlar. "Maybe I can find out something from these guys about whatever Alexia's up to. You just focus on yourself right now, Goob."


	26. Part Three - The Start of Tomorrow

They returned to the mansion. Alexia moved ahead of him, in the greasy glow of the wrought-iron Victorian wall lamps. She'd said she needed to gather what remained of her research before they could leave Antarctica. She had a plan, she'd said, though hadn't told him what that plan was.

Inside Alexia's room, Grayson watched her run her fingers along the wall, stop, then jimmy loose a square panel from the wall molding. Behind the panel was a fire-proof electronic safe, of the sort used by responsible paranoiacs to protect their personal documents. Alexia tapped her pass-code into the keypad, and the thing beeped, swung open. She collected a manila folder from inside, and several print-outs, which were dog-eared and yellowed with age.

"You were keeping your research in your room?"

"If I'd kept it in my laboratory, it would have been the first place they'd look," she said, leafing through the manila folder, taking inventory of the papers there. "I never believed in that computer business. I find physical records are the best records." Alexia mouthed numbers to herself as she flipped through the pages, her brow creasing with concentration. "Seems everything is here," she added.

"Okay, so we got your research. But what's your escape plan?" Grayson watched her stack the print-outs, then slide them between the dividers in the manila folder. "I can't fly Alfred's jet, and neither can you. And there's still the matter of the Redfields. They're witnesses, Alexia. We can't leave them alive." He frowned. Then he said, "Same goes for Albert and his crew."

Alexia looked at him and smiled, in the way one might smile at a small idiot child. "This facility has a self-destruct sequence," she said, tucking the folder under her arm. "All Umbrella facilities do. It's a security measure, so there's nothing left that links the company to our bioweapons programs. Which, may I remind you, are _highly_ illegal."

"Okay, so you blow up the facility. We still die," he said, and shrugged. Grayson sat down on Alexia's bed; it was soft and warm, and nothing at all like the bed he'd slept in on Rockfort, which had been little better than a prison cot with coil-springs. "We have no way out of Antarctica, Alexia."

"Oh, ye of little faith." Alexia sat down beside him, and asked, "Did you really think my plan was to sit around Antarctica for the rest of my life?" She scooted closer, sliding her hand possessively along his inner-thigh, then over his crotch. "Lord Spencer and I had a deal. You see, Grayson. When a facility blows up, it alerts Umbrella's Red Queen network. Protocol is to send a clean-up detail to comb over whatever is left of the facility. They scrub the site of anything the explosion might have missed, and ensure there's nothing left that could indict the company."

Grayson nodded. "The ping hits the Red Queen network, and Spencer knows you made it out of cryostasis." He watched the candelabras flickering in the dark. "So," he said, "the facility blows up, kills the Redfields, Wesker, and the H.C.F. But how are _we_ going to survive that?" He looked at her. "You might be superhuman, Alexia, but you still need heat. You still need food and shelter. Basics. And that's assuming the explosion didn't kill us first."

"There's a safe-room deeper in the facility," said Alexia. "There's enough supplies down there to last us a few weeks. Though it shouldn't take Spencer that long to send the clean-up detail."

"You really had this all planned out? You and Spencer?" Grayson had met Spencer a few times, but couldn't really remember his face, just that he'd been very old then. "You sure he's even still alive?"

"Spencer's not dead," said Alexia, and she sounded certain of that. She touched his arm, running her fingers along the fabric of his sleeve. Alexia had this consistent need to touch him, he realized. Probably to remind him that he belonged to her. Or maybe, he thought, she still wasn't entirely convinced he was real. "We need only to reach the safe-room, Grayson," she said.

Grayson stood and gently pushed away Alexia's hand. She frowned at him. "We should head for that safe-room," he said, diplomatically. "I'm guessing the terminal for the self-destruction sequence is on the way?" He'd never gone that deep into the facility. As a boy, Grayson had stayed closed to the mansion, or to his father and Alexia. Beyond certain levels, the facility had been as familiar to him as Borneo, and had concerned him just as much.

Alexia gave him a sour look. Then she stood, smoothing her skirt. "Yes," she said irritably, "the terminal is on the way, Grayson."

"We can fuck later, Alexia." He was surprised by his own candidness, and he gave her an apologetic look. "We need to worry about getting out of here first," he added smoothly, and Grayson opened the door for her. As she passed, he gave her a theatrical bow. "After you, mistress," he said, in his best Igor voice.

They entered the foyer. Grayson heard the door open, and he leaned over the balustrade to look. It was Albert Wesker, all alone. He stood in stark black contrast to the white marble.

"Sorry to intrude, Alexia," came Wesker's voice, like a lion's purr. He removed his sunglasses and tucked them inside the breast pocket of his Kevlar vest. "We need to talk."

"What took you so long, Albert?" asked Alexia, smiling. "It's nice to see an old colleague," she added, with pretentious work-place cordiality. "We last spoke fifteen years ago. You're here for the T-Veronica, yes?"

"No point in beating around it then." Wesker idled at the bottom of the stairs, watching them, his hands on his hips. "Your little boy-toy survived our encounter on Rockfort. Good." He smiled, and the smile made Grayson uncomfortable. It was the smile of someone who was planning something. "But yes, I'm here for the T-Veronica. My employer wants you alive."

"You mean Martin Bingham?"

A look of unexpectedness flitted across Wesker's pale, square face, which, Grayson decided, was like something cut from dull marble.

Alexia leaned sideways on the balustrade. "I know your little plan," she said, still smiling. "Your friend Callahan told us." She shrugged one shoulder. "He's dead now, of course. Another failed experiment like father."

Wesker frowned. "Alexia, don't make me force you to cooperate," he said impatiently. "You've become such a beautiful woman. I'd hate to ruin your face."

"You're starting to irritate me, Albert."

Alexia started down the stairs, erupted into a cloud of gold flames like some vengeful angel, her dress burning away in black motes, dusting the steps in its ashes. Her skin bubbled and turned gray, the flesh veined with a map-work of black lines and pebbled with dark chitin, as if she was Alexia as some horny entomologist might have imagined her. By the time she'd reached the bottom of the stairs, the last of her humanity had burned away in the fire, and she stood there now, as something Grayson only vaguely recognized as his lover.

Wesker swung, but when his fist connected with Alexia's head, she didn't stagger. Alexia backhanded Wesker so hard that he soared across the foyer and crashed into the wall, cracking the marble, crumpling like a dead spider. Then he climbed to his feet, hurtled toward Alexia and kicked. Alexia side-stepped the kick like a matador, and she kicked Wesker in the ass, sent him headlong into the floor.

"I see you still have a terrible habit of underestimating people," said Alexia, and Grayson was relieved to hear her voice coming from the mutant's mouth, reminding him that she was still in there. "Bingham. What does he want? I have my guesses."

"He wants you," said Wesker, getting up.

Alexia splashed something at Wesker. It looked like blood, but when it hit the air, it caught fire, the sharp tang of something chemical filling the air. Wesker scrambled away from the flames and springboarded off the wall, landing another punch on Alexia. She caught it in the cheek, actually stumbled from the force of it. As she reeled, Wesker punched again, so hard Grayson heard his fist connect with her, and Alexia went down.

Wesker's attention turned to him now, and right then, Grayson knew something bad was about to happen. Wesker vanished, and, no transition at all, had him pinned to the wall by the throat. Wesker lifted him one-handedly, his muscles not straining at all with the effort, and moved behind him, twisted his arm into a painful lock that, Grayson knew, would dislocate his shoulder if Wesker added the slightest bit more pressure.

"If you don't cooperate, Alexia, things will end badly," warned Wesker, and he squeezed Grayson's wrist painfully, threatened to break the bone. His hand was like a steel manacle, and it hurt just as much. "I'll rip your little boyfriend's head off. Right here, in front of you. Be a good girl for his sake." Grayson smelled the metallic tang of Wesker's cologne; it was threatening in its smell, made Grayson think of knives, and those knives were poised to kill him.

Alexia froze. Grayson could see she was gauging Wesker, unsure if he meant business. But Grayson knew he meant business.

"Not talking?" said Wesker.

There was a sudden, sharp pain of something breaking, and Grayson realized that it was his wrist. He screamed, and the pain shot up his arm like a white-hot razor-wire.

" _Stop_!"

"Will you cooperate, Alexia? Or should I break his other wrist too?" Wesker laughed, a rumble in his throat. "Maybe I should rip his cock off. I'm sure you wouldn't like that. I know he wouldn't." Wesker patted Grayson on the head, and said, "No hard feelings, Harman. I actually like you. But this is business."

The doors to the foyer burst open. Grayson thought the H.C.F had come to provide back-up for Wesker, but he saw, through the pain-haze, that it was Claire, and a dark-haired man who he assumed was the brother Alexia had mentioned. Claire had a military-grade rifle pointed at Wesker, and her brother had another rifle trained on Alexia.

"Chris, make sure she doesn't move," said Claire, edging around Alexia.

"Can't believe you're still kicking, Wesker," said Chris. He looked at Alexia, the rifle pressed against the back of her skull. Then he said to her, in a way that clearly conveyed he meant business, and that he intended to make good on whatever threat he was about to make, "You move one fucking muscle, bitch, and I'll blow your head open. I should, because you killed Steve. But you might be more valuable alive. Probably know a lot about Umbrella. You're one of the O.G scientists, right? The second to last, in fact. Birkin's dead. My sister killed him in Raccoon City."

A gunshot, and at first Grayson thought Chris had shot Alexia. But something hit him in the head, and his world went black.


	27. Interlude 14: Well, Shit

Chris had raised her to seize opportunities whenever they presented themselves; so Claire did. Harman's head dissolved into a spray of blood. Most of the blood spattered Wesker's face, some of it on the portrait of the Ashfords that hung above the doorway behind him—something poetic, Claire decided, in that.

A sudden angry scream. Alexia. " _You killed him_!" She turned to Claire, her mutant eyes burning like fire-pits, like the kind Claire had sat around on Lake Matoskah.

"Shit," said Chris, beside her.

Alexia started to burn the foyer down.

She spattered the walls and the floor with stuff that might have been her blood, and whatever it was, it smelled like butane. And the blood ignited, burned away the wooden wall moldings, crumbling the marble tiles, turning the decorative suits of English armor, and the wrought-iron lamps to Dali sculptures.

Claire started to sweat, and it hurt to breathe too deeply because the air seared her throat. It made her remember something she had read once, a long time ago, in a _Newsweek_ article: _Heat is a respiratory hazard... When the air is hot enough, one breath can kill_ _._

Wesker hurtled toward the door, faster than any normal human, narrowly side-stepping a line of white-hot fire. Some of the flames caught the pant-leg of his fatigues, burned the flesh underneath to something raw and black-red gelatinous, the reek of cooked meat and burnt boot-rubber stinging Claire's nostrils. He put the fire out with frantic pats.

As he reached the door, Wesker whipped around and punched her. Claire hit the tile, banging her head pretty hard on the marble. "Enjoy, Claire." Before he'd gone, Wesker pointed at Alexia, said, "I'm not finished with you," and left.

Chris helped her up and said, "We need to get out of here. Now."

Claire's head ached, and she was pretty sure she was bleeding. She nodded, when Chris told her to move, and staggered out the door. When the doors closed behind them, Claire could see the fire through the windows, the foyer burning like the inside of a furnace. Alexia did not follow them. She wondered if Alexia had trapped herself in the fire, or if she had gone to Harman, maybe as some last-ditch attempt to bring him back through some means of weird virological voodoo.

They walked away from the mansion, from the smell of burnt wood and chemicals; and, Claire imagined, from sadness. If Alexia's sadness had a smell, she decided that was it—and it was everywhere.

"We need to get off this frozen rock," said Chris, pissed. They walked in silence, down the cool concrete corridor, where the reek of the burning mansion slowly gave way to the faint must of rusted pipes, water-leaks, and wet concrete. "Your head okay?" asked Chris finally, without looking at her.

"Yeah," said Claire, pretty sure it was okay, even if it was ringing. She touched the back of her skull, felt blood; but it was just a little bit, not enough to belong to anything more serious than a cut. Then said, suddenly feeling like a very small scared child, "You're mad."

"You bet your fucking ass." Chris stopped and turned toward her. Sweat and soot smudges on his face; it somehow made her brother look feral, like an angry wild-boy. "I was counting on bringing Alexia in alive. Why do you think I disappeared, Claire? I was looking for a way to bring Umbrella down. Here comes this golden opportunity, and you fuck up and shoot her boyfriend dead. And now _she's_ probably dead."

"I _cared_ about Steve," said Claire, and shoved Chris harder than she'd meant to. "You heard what Steve said before he died. Harman beat him over the head, held Steve down so Alexia could murder him. If he hadn't done that, maybe Steve would have gotten away again. Maybe he'd still be alive." She shook her head, and then asked, "How can you be so goddamn callous?"

"Look," said Chris, grabbing her shoulders and shaking her in frustration. "I _get_ it. But Claire, one guy isn't worth putting innocent people at risk. If Alexia survives that fire, and she gets out of Antarctica? The world is seriously fucked. She's gonna kill when she gets out of here. And whoever dies, their blood's gonna be on our hands."

"What are we going to do to her? Sure, I killed Harman. But what are we going to do to Alexia?" Claire gestured in the direction of the mansion and said, "She's a bioweapon. I'm a fucking college student, and you're just an ex-soldier."

"You survived this far on your own. Stop being so goddamn hard on yourself." Chris paused. "Listen. During my travels, came across several records from Umbrella, out of an old archive in Germany. Every facility has a self-destruction sequence. We need to blow this place up and get out before the count hits zero. We can do it. I did it before, back at the Spencer estate."

"You've seen proof of Umbrella's bullshit, and you haven't turned it over to the authorities?"

"Okay, so we blow it up," said Claire. "Any idea how we do that?"

"Those same records had schematics of this place. It's how I knew where to look when Rodrigo told me you'd been taken to Antarctica," said Chris. "Controls are on the lower levels, near a cryo-storage room. Where Umbrella keeps their special bioweapons on ice."

"These records just happened to have schematics?"

"Alexia worked at the German lab for a very, very short time when she was nine, as a lab assistant," Chris explained. "Couple of months, out in Berlin," he added, and shook his head. "There were details about this facility on her file. Apparently, Umbrella had been grooming her to take over the place;. Never went into the specifics of why."

"You _knew_ about Alexia?"

"I knew _of_ her," said Chris, letting her go. "I didn't expect to actually _meet_ her."


	28. Part Three - The Plant

He was sure he had been dead. It had been as if he had never existed, a void, a complete and deep nothingness.

Grayson was in a bed, he was sure, and he realized it was Alexia's bed. Lamplight glinted in his periphery, and when he looked at it, the light hurt his eyes, as if he was some nocturnal thing waking to sunlight, a creature who had never known the world beyond the darkness until now. Debussy's ghost played the vinyl-crackling piano notes of _Claire De Lune_ somewhere in the room. His head ached deeply, a pain-frequency that resonated in his skull and threatened to crack the bone, in the same fashion a soprano's voice could shatter glass at certain sustained oscillations. His hair was matted, and smelled strongly of blood.

Someone sat on the bed, and then a body was pressing against him, and it was warm, and it smelled of lilac rain. "I'm so glad you're all right," said Alexia, and as he looked at her, her eyes had that pink-wet quality of someone who had been crying, and had been crying hard. She buried her face in his blood-soaked shirt. "When Redfield shot you, you didn't move for hours, Grayson. You were dead. You were dead. Half your bloody head was gone, and I—"

"I'm okay," said Grayson, only partially telling the truth. He touched Alexia's face, and it was cool and smooth under his fingertips. His head hurt, and so did his chest, which felt hot and tight. _You were dead_ , Grayson heard his voice say. And now he was back, his matter re-assembled into some vaguely familiar human shape. "You're human again," he said, shifting the subject. He did not want to think about his death, or ponder what state he now existed in. Grayson joked, "You pulled a Seth Brundle on me."

Alexia sob-laughed, and she shook her head. "What are you talking about?"

"Movie," said Grayson. He had forgotten Alexia had still been in cryostasis when The Fly remake had come out, and he was sort of disappointed because it had rendered his joke innocuous. "They remade The Fly in 1986," he clarified. "It was directed by the guy who did Videodrome. Remember Videodrome? _Long live the new flesh_..."

"You die, and the first thing you talk about when you return to me is a bloody Chronenberg movie." Alexia pressed her cheek against his shoulder and slipped her arms around him, fingers locked across the small of his back. "Yes, I remember the movie, Grayson," she said. "James Woods. That scene where the man splits open and has those tumescent things grow out of him, after Max Renn shoots him." She looked at him and smiled. "Good to know the virus hasn't changed anything about you. You're still Grayson. The same man I embarrassingly fell for."

"Gross. You're starting to sound like the protagonist from a smut romance. Something with a title like _The Rogue and the Lady_ , or _Her Faithful Servant._ This is usually the part where they start talking about my throbbing member," said Grayson, and laughed, and Alexia laughed too.

"Know a lot about smut romances, Grayson?" asked Alexia.

"When you're bored and sitting in a dentist's office with nothing but shitty romance books to read, you read them."

Alexia laughed again.

Once the mood had gone cold again, Grayson asked, somewhat apprehensively, "What happened Alexia? I don't really remember much. I know I was shot in the head." He looked at his wrist, and realized it wasn't broken anymore. "It's Bingham's prototype. Isn't it?"

Somehow, the knowledge that he was infected with a weird quasi-synthetic virus didn't bother him as much as it should have. What worried him more was what that made him, what sort of biological definition he now fell under. Was he technically undead? Or had he simply evolved, as Project W had initially intended? He felt good, Grayson decided, flexing his fingers. Better than he'd felt before, the mild pains and aches excluded, which had already started to subside into a dull, annoying ache.

"It is. Alexia hesitated, as though she couldn't be sure how he'd react to whatever she was about to do, or about to tell him. She cleared her throat, then got off the bed, wiping at her eyes. She wore another dark dress, similar to the one that had burned away, and Grayson wondered how many of those dresses she actually had, and who they had belonged to.

Slowly, Alexia motioned to a full-length mirror on her right: _look_.

Grayson got up and looked.

He wasn't surprised to see Wesker's eyes staring back at him, like two magma pits. Blood caked his hair, where the bullet had struck him, which had been just above his right eye, almost dead-center of his forehead. He hadn't realized how uncomfortably sticky it was until then, and wiped at the blood, to no effect. "I feel disgusting," he said, and shook his head. "I need a shower."

"You're taking this better than I thought you would," said Alexia, watching him. She shook her head, and said, "We don't have time to dally. We need to continue with the plan, Grayson."

"Question."

"Answer," replied Alexia.

"What am I now?" he asked, very seriously. "Am I undead?"

"Say a patient dies during an operation, but the surgeons manage to revive them. Are they undead, Grayson, or are they simply very fortunate?"

"Very fortunate."

"Exactly," said Alexia. "You're _better_ now, Grayson. Evolved. Perfect." She seemed almost excited: "The virus mutated your DNA, Grayson. It's quite literally a part of you, not simply a guest."

"You seem really excited about that," said Grayson, staring at her. Besides aching, Grayson felt different, but on a personality level. Whatever the virus had done, it had dulled his sense of emotion. He was a rough idea, a formless hunk of stone continually sculpted by the hands of some invisible perfectionist, little by little coaxing out his finer details until he was a clear concept, a tangible form. It was a strange feeling, and he had nothing to compare it to. Grayson guessed that it might have been how someone felt after they had spent their entire lives as morbidly obese, then lost two hundred pounds and acquired a six-pack.

"I am," said Alexia, looking at him. "I fixed Bingham's virus, and it turned out well. I'm always excited after a successful experiment."

She let him rest up, become acquainted with his new body; and they talked, about everything. Alexia mentioned a plant, but when he'd asked about it, she'd just smiled and said, "You'll see."

They took a lift down and emerged in the ant-hive. The ants were still skittering over the hive in massive black-red clumps, like pulsating tumors. He looked away because it was gross, and followed Alexia further down. They passed her office, then down a flight of expansion-grate stairs that wound around the enormous hive-room, and went through an automated door labeled STRICT ACCESS in faded red stencil-letters. Alexia had used her security override on the terminal mounted by the door.

The room beyond was a long corridor, much like the rest of the facility, and had probably once been lab-space. This was probably where Umbrella had kept their hot labs; the Antarctica facility had, from what Alexia had told him as a boy, the prestigious honor of hosting some of the company's most dangerous projects because of its remoteness, and the distinct lack of law-enforcement since Antarctica was essentially a no-man's land, a patchwork of scientific outpost-states who more or less followed the creed: _mind your business, and I mind my own_.

They walked down the corridor without talking. There were other rooms down here, mostly cryo-storage space. "We keep several tyrants in this facility," said Alexia, as they passed one of those rooms, her voice cutting through the crypt-silence with the preciseness of a stiletto. "They're dead now, of course. When the facility was shut down, the primary power systems were cut off and rerouted to the cryotank's aux grid, which killed the specimens' life-support. A necessary sacrifice to ensure I survived the fifteen years in cryostasis."

"They killed all of their projects just for you?" he said, and it came out much harsher than he'd intended. Grayson shook his head, then said, apologetically, "Sorry. Didn't mean it like that. I'm glad they did, obviously. Just surprised."

"You shouldn't be so surprised," said Alexia, and she smiled. "Remember, I was the director of the facility. I called for the shut-down. I still had to acquire permission from the Board of Directors of course, as I wasn't completely autonomous from Umbrella. I had bosses, too." She folded her arms. Then, "They said yes, after I outlined my research. Well, the technical parts. I didn't tell them my personal intentions with the T-Veronica. I was the most valuable scientist this company ever had, Grayson. The smartest. Birkin was the only one who ever came close to me, and he's dead now."

"Don't sound so upset," he joked, nudging her with his arm.

"I've been waiting for Birkin to die since the day I had met him," said Alexia. "He tried sabotaging my research on several occasions. He'd even tried to make me look stupid in front of the Board. Birkin _hated_ me." She grinned, as if the fact Birkin had hated her was genuinely amusing.

"Birkin never stopped either. Guy was an asshole," said Grayson, and nodded. "He lived in Raccoon, and used to come into the Black Room, that bar I worked a few years ago, and he'd go out of his way to piss me off, or make me look bad to my managers, complaining about shit in his drinks, or that I made something wrong, or that I gave him the wrong change, or I'd ignored him. He'd go on about how it must have sucked you were dead, in that usual asshole way of his. Luckily, my boss was a reasonable guy. Ex-Hell's Angel named Carl. Big motherfucker with a shaved head and tattoos and piercings everywhere. One day, he had enough of Birkin and tossed him on his ass into the street. Told him if he came back, he'd beat the shit out of him." Grayson shook his head. "Carl was a great guy. Died in a motorcycle accident though, about a year ago."

"You've led a very colorful life since I'd gone into stasis, Grayson," said Alexia. "Did Birkin ever come back?"

"Nope," said Grayson, grinning. "Saw him a few days later at a local convenience store. I was buying some beer, and he was picking up Winstons. He tried starting shit with me, talking about you. So I said enough and beat his ass down in the parking lot."

Alexia laughed. "Oh my goodness, I wish I had been there. What happened after that?"

"Well, he got a few punches in and managed to give me a shiner," said Grayson, laughing. "Jill was there in the car with me, and she got out and had to pull me off of him. Birkin's wife Annette—you remember her—dragged his ass away, saying she was going to press charges."

"That was the end of that, Grayson?" Alexia looked genuinely interested in his story, which was new to him. But then he remembered she had been in cryostasis the last fifteen years, and hadn't seen the world beyond the facility since. She was like some woman who had been lost at sea for several years, who wanted to know about everything she'd missed in the world.

"No. Annette called the cops. Or maybe the cashier did? No idea." Grayson shrugged. "Anyway, next thing I knew, the cops were taking me away in cuffs, and Jill was saying she'd get me out. I got one call, and I called Alfred collect, and he was complaining at me on the phone about how he'd have to go talk to his attorney now. But Jill got me out, after pulling in a few favors from some guys she knew in the RPD. After that, Birkin never fucked with me again."

"You're an absolute _rogue_ ," said Alexia, chuckling. Then, "My brother had an attorney?"

Grayson nodded. "You would not believe the legal shit Alfred kept stepping in because of Rockfort. There were a lot of investigations into the place, and even a short stint in court. Of course, the investigations never turned up anything, so they never managed to indict him. If anything, Alfred was a master of scrubbing evidence, and Umbrella has a damn good legal team. He had a head for law, and would have been great at it, I think, if he hadn't fetishized militant autocracy."

"Did Annette ever bring you to court?"

"Nope. Can't really do that when you use the same legal team. Umbrella probably told her to let it go."

They rounded a corner. He had been so busy talking, he hadn't really paid attention to where they had gone. It was a room full of computers, and they were still running on auxiliary power. The room might have been a lab; there were sterile cabinets, stainless steel tables, technical-looking microscopes and machines. "There was one thing we needed to do before we initiate the self-destruct sequence," said Alexia, approaching one of the terminals. She tapped out a sequence on the keys. The computer was old, an IBM remnant of the 1980s that ran PC-DOS. But that had been as much as Grayson knew about it; he had never been much of a computer guy, and what he did know had been things Alfred had told him, or things he had heard Alexia say.

"What are you doing?" he asked, watching lines of code cascading on the monitor.

"Checking on the one other thing besides myself that survived the shut-down," said Alexia.

There was an observation window, not too far from the terminal she was on. Grayson went to it and peered inside. Lights flickered on, and he saw it then: an enormous plant-thing that looked as if it belonged in some prehistoric forest, a thing that had been revived from a fossil, or from cells discovered in some unknown cave-plant deep underground. It pulsated, and he saw things moving around it in the room, and realized those things were people, or had once been people, but they had mutated into chitinous things, husks of human forms.

"What in the fuck?" he said, awed.

"I never devised a name for it," said Alexia, joining him. "It was a side-project I'd worked on, cultivating a plant with the T-Veronica. I'd been inspired as a girl by a plant the Arklay scientists had been working on. You'll recall the tentacles you've seen?" She looked at him.

"So this is where they come from," he said, understanding.

"Precisely," said Alexia. "I'd mentioned the plant before. This is it."

"But what's with the infected, and why are we here?"

"The infected are by-products of my experiments of combining the T-Veronica with human DNA," said Alexia, as if she was commenting on the weather. "I was trying to produce thralls. Worker ants, so to speak. None of them proved very viable, though in later testing they started to demonstrate slight sentience."

"Okay. But why are we here? I thought we were blowing the facility up."

"We are," said Alexia. "I want to create a deterrent for the Redfields. Think of the plant as a giant organic printer."

Grayson watched the plant extend a fleshy tube which, faintly, reminded him of the Fallopian tubes he had seen in various biology books. It made him cringe. It was rising toward the ceiling, swelling, a pink throbbing flesh-thing that lay on the floor beyond the observation glass like a flaccid penis. "What the fuck is it doing, Alexia?" He looked at her. Then, "It's fucking gross. And you're gross for making it look like a giant vagina-dick."

"Vagina-dick? That doesn't even make sense, Grayson," said Alexia, shaking her head. "It's creating a 'junk sculpture'. A copy of me. My DNA is in the plant as well, which is how this symbiosis between myself and _it_ was created. The junk sculpture is created from garbage plant and bug DNA, and from my DNA. Cast-off created through processes I won't bother explaining to you because you wouldn't understand anyway. It's like a very faulty clone." She glanced at the window. "The clone is incubating right now, but when it's time, it'll stop the Redfields."


	29. Part Three - The Captain

Alexia told him they were almost to the safe-room. They loped down a set of grooved metal stairs, then down a hall. He did not know this place; Alexia said this had been mostly storage-space, where Umbrella had kept their most dangerous projects on ice. "I was retrieving a specimen one day," said Alexia, as they walked, "and a thought occurred to me. I started to form the basis of my cryotank. I built the machine myself, you know, after studying the schematics of the cryoboxes we'd kept our specimens in."

The rest of the facility was cold, but down here, it was a synthetic cold, as if someone had cranked down the industrial air-conditioning to sub-zero temperatures, and had left it running for fifteen years. Grayson shivered, though the cold did not bother him as much as it should have, and it did not seem to faze Alexia, who walked past the tiered shelves of cryoboxes as if she was walking through a spring garden. Patches of blue-white frost clung to the walls and the boxes, and he had to be careful where he walked because the ground was slippery with ice.

"Why is the safe-room all the way down here?" said Grayson, staring at the cryoboxes. Each box was wired to a central computer; though the computer was dead, which meant the things that had been inside the boxes were dead too.

"It's where the bomb payload is weakest," said Alexia, and they were through another door, adjacent to the storage-room. "The safe-room itself is heavily reinforced, however. Sort of like a bomb-shelter. It's a few more levels down. We'll need to take a lift."

In this room, Grayson saw the bombs, contained inside lead-coated cylinders, which were arranged on a tall industrial framework. There was a terminal up on the catwalk where they stood, and Alexia approached it. "Couldn't Wesker reach the safe-room? Even the Redfields?" asked Grayson. "I mean, if it's just a lift-ride away."

"It was made specifically for me," said Alexia, keying her login on the computer. "For when I woke up," she added. Like the computer in the plant-room, this one was also an IBM remnant. Grayson found it sort of funny that such an outmoded piece-of-shit could detonate a nuclear payload, which had enough power behind it to leave a Hiroshima-sized crater in the Antarctic permafrost. "Besides, the Redfields were planning on blowing up the facility. Might as well expedite the process for them." Alexia smiled, and it was a cold smile.

"How do you know what they were planning?" Grayson paused, then shook his head. "Right," he said, mostly to himself. "You know everything that happens in this facility."

"Indeed, darling," said Alexia, and she kissed his cheek.

" _Stop_ ," said a voice, and the voice had that bad cellphone quality of HUNK's.

Grayson looked. It wasn't HUNK, but it was a guy with a mask like HUNK's. But his mask looked decidedly less fly-like, and more like something that belonged in World War I, in mustard gas explosions. The man wore H.C.F gear, and he was pointing a rifle at them. Four other guys in the same black fatigues flanked him, and they were armed to the teeth. _Specialists_ , Grayson thought. _Merc professionals_. He guessed they had been Callahan's team, or perhaps had worked with Callahan's team, and were probably an elite unit that had accompanied Wesker. But Wesker wasn't among them.

"Call me The Captain," said The Captain, and his voice had that same robot-coldness Grayson had heard in HUNK's voice. It was the sort of voice endemic to professional killers, and these guys probably answered directly to Bingham, his personal squad of hired guns. "Step away from the terminal," said The Captain. "Our guns are loaded with anti-B.O.W rounds, and we will use them."

Grayson had heard about anti-B.O.W rounds from Alfred, though had always been under the impression that they were designed as explosives, for use in grenade launchers, or in hand grenades. Anti-B.O.W rounds were filled with P-Epsilon, a compound that had been developed by Umbrella to kill haywire bioweapons. As Grayson understood it, the compound had the capability to cook down a bioweapon's cells, like a hyper-cancer, so the whole beast fell apart on a micro-level. Bingham had probably streamlined the design, possibly had even changed the chemical make-up to act as sedatives or paralytics, or perhaps a slow but precise form of biological cell-torture because Bingham, ultimately, wanted Alexia and him alive. Whatever the case, it was bad news, and Grayson did not want to be hit by them.

The Captain said, "I won't ask you again, Dr. Ashford. Step away from the terminal." The gun was still leveled at Alexia. "My employer wants your cooperation, and nothing more. This can be easy."

Alexia did not address The Captain. Instead, she said to Grayson, "Darling?" She grinned emptily, folding her arms and leaning back on the terminal. There were flashing red lights, and a cool approximated female voice looped above them: _Self-destruct system has been activated. All personnel, evacuate the facility_. "Be a good boy and dispose of them."

Grayson was excited to learn what sort of damage he could do. He ran, and it was a weird feeling, as if he was riding in the slipstream of a fighter jet. The Captain fired at him, but Grayson side-stepped the projectile—he had seen it coming, a long ripple in the air like a slow-motion Hollywood bullet—and swung his fist. But The Captain countered his blow and flipped him onto his back.

A B.O.W round grazed his leg, and it was the most excruciating pain Grayson had ever felt, like someone peeling his skin away with a rusty filet knife coated in salt rock. He got up, soldiered through the pain. Grayson punched the man who had shot him so hard that the bone of his skull cracked under his knuckles like a brittle egg-shell, and he died instantly, slumping to the floor, blood pooling underneath his head, and the shattered pieces of his goggles.

His bullet-wound had gone necrotic, but Grayson did not feel any pain.

"He's healing," he heard one of the H.C.F guys say, and the man had been right. The wound was stitching itself back together.

Alexia clapped behind him. "Oh, this is _brilliant_ ," she said.

Someone fired at Alexia. One of her tentacles crashed through the wall and took the shot; and then it impaled the shooter, lifting him high into the air. He slid a few inches down the vine with a wet meat noise, and he was screaming, the sound coming like a long burst of static from his mask. Alexia rolled her eyes and waved her hand, and the tentacle whipped sideways and flung the man across the room. The mercenary hit the wall with a visceral noise. He did not get up.

"Nice one," said Grayson.

"That's the only one I'm giving you, Grayson," said Alexia. She hoisted herself atop the terminal and crossed a long pale leg over the other. "Of course, if you _do_ need saving, I'll be your knight in shining armor."

There were three left, and The Captain told them to fire on his command—all at once. Grayson saw the bullets streaming through the air, and wove between them, punching one guy in the throat and collapsing his esophagus, turning, grabbing the wrist of the other mercenary and breaking it, driving his fist as hard as he could through the soldier's glass-goggled balaclava and shattering his skull.

The Captain shuffled backward, sprayed a few rounds. Grayson side-stepped the projectiles, crushing the barrel of the gun so it could not fire anymore and kicking The Captain in the stomach.

The Captain doubled over, winded, and clawed for his radio. "Code 12, Code 12," said The Captain frantically, and with difficulty. He sounded breathless, his voice a threadbare machine-hiss. "We need back-up. Discard mission parameters. Specimen is stronger than diags suggested. _Get Wesker down here._ "

Grayson ripped the radio from his hands and crushed it, and then snapped The Captain's neck. He watched the body slump to the ground. Crouching, he started rifling through The Captain's tactical vest, coming up with a PDA.

"Well, this is interesting," he said, showing the PDA to Alexia. Above, the female machine-voice said they had three hours to evacuate the facility.

"What the hell is this thing?" she asked, taking it. Then she said, "By the way, good work on the squad, Grayson," and she kissed him fully on the mouth.

Once he had finished kissing her, Grayson said, "Personal data assistant. Computer for your palm. Bet there might be something about Bingham on there. Though we can wait until we reach the safe-room to find out."

They left the room, and the dead mercenaries, going further down into the facility, until it had felt as if he had been transported to some underworld of concrete and metal. It was warmer down here, now that they were away from the cryo-storage units. The evacuation message looped at five minute intervals, though it was muffled this far down, distant. The only lights down here were halogen tubes on the walls, which gave the place a sort of menacing look, like a hallway from a horror movie.

Alexia was fiddling with the PDA. "Incredible how far technology has come in fifteen years," she commented, her footsteps filling the silent air, ghost-like.

"Computers are getting smaller and smaller," said Grayson, pushing his hands inside his pockets. "Electronics are the new toys for kids these days. They got these things called tamagotchis that the kids like. You take care of a digital pet. Comes on a key-chain, and kids like to put it on their book-bags and stuff." He shook his head. "I don't get it, personally," he added.

Alexia scrolled through the contents of The Captain's PDA. "Sounds like a waste of time," she said.

"It is."

She laughed. Then the laughing went away, and she stared at the PDA screen, raising an eyebrow. "They have data from my laboratory on this," she said. "Cursory notes really. I kept my research on paper." She paused, scrolling through more of the PDA's contents. "You have my research papers, yes?"

Grayson nodded, patting his suit jacket. "Safe and sound," he said.

Alexia looked relieved. Then she said, "Apparently, The Captain was personally hired by Bingham when HUNK wouldn't take the job. Who is HUNK?"

"A guy you should be thankful wasn't the one who came after you," said Grayson.

"Wesker had no clue they were after you," she said, abandoning the subject of HUNK. She read something on the PDA, her mouth a thin line. "Curious why Bingham kept him out of the loop."

"Maybe Wesker doesn't know about Project Wesker?" Grayson suggested. "Would make sense. Wesker won't dig into something he doesn't know anything about. Maybe Bingham's afraid he'd have an identity crisis, and wouldn't cooperate with him?" He shrugged. Grayson did not really care why Albert did not know, nor did he care what the circumstances were between him and Bingham that had led to Wesker not knowing. Right now, his only concern was getting out of Antarctica. "Who knows. Albert's always been one of those guys who are unpredictable."


	30. Interlude 15: Gone

Someone had activated the self-destruct sequence. The bored intercom voice announced they had two hours left until the facility was destroyed. "Guess Alexia beat us to the punch," said Claire, panting, skidding on a pool of pipe-water, which had partially frozen. She cursed, catching herself.

"Or maybe it was Wesker." Chris breathed through his nose, like a professional runner. "Who knows, who cares," he added, panting. "We need to get to that jet."

They made it to the atrium, in just fifteen minutes. She did not see Steve's body anywhere. Had Steve somehow survived and escaped? Or had someone taken him away? Wesker had been after Alexia, had probably wanted her virus because that was how all Umbrella personnel operated: a constant gladiatorial match of greed, of achieving new nightmare-levels with the toxic viral shit the company pumped out.

They found themselves in some sort of warehouse. Claire vaguely remembered passing through this space, on the way from the garage, where the chopper had burned on the helipad in the white-gray glow of Arctic day... There were crates stacked here, steel modules piled high and stamped with the Umbrella hexagon.

There was a large mesh platform in here, on a high steel framework which hovered above an enormous ant hive. Fat cables and accordioned wires covered the walls, the cold light of fluorescence filling the space, coloring it in varying ghost-shades of blue and gray. Claire saw something rising from underneath the platform, and realized, with a sick feeling in her stomach, that it was some large fleshy tube-thing that looked as if it belonged in some giant's reproductive system.

"It's fucking Alexia," said Chris, through his teeth. He unslung the rifle he had taken earlier from the dead men in the atrium, the ones Steve had killed.

The tube-thing started to contract, in a way that made Claire think of someone retching. It deposited something onto the platform, and Claire realized it was Alexia, as she had seen her in the mansion: a mutant woman of gray insect-flesh. But there was something off about her now, like her sentience had dulled somehow; she seemed stupider, husk-like. She did not even speak when she saw them.

"Stop standing around, Claire," said Chris, and he moved, just as one of Alexia's tentacles shot up from beneath the platform and had nearly speared his shoulder. He fired the rifle, gouts of greenish-blue blood flowering across Alexia's chest; though the bullets barely fazed her.

"Chris, there's something wrong here," said Claire, but Chris told her to be quiet and concentrate. Claire did, and she ran after her brother, stumbling out of the way of another tentacle, putting painful pressure on her wounded ankle. She yelped, barely scrabbling out of the way of another tentacle.

Chris got her around the wrist and yanked her to her feet. "I know your foot's hurt. But try to ignore it for now." He shoved her out of the way, then lunged sideways as Alexia spattered the blood-stuff Claire had seen in the mansion on the grating, and ignited it.

The entire room reeked of butane. Claire shot Alexia in the head, but it only seemed to piss her off. "Harman deserved what he got," said Claire, ducking underneath a tentacle and shooting it, something viscous spattering her cheek, and burning. She wiped it on the jacket-sleeve of her Arctic coat. Above, a voice announced they had an hour and thirty minutes until detonation. "He deserved getting it in the head, after what you and him did to Steve!"

Alexia said nothing, and that worried Claire. There was definitely something wrong. Alexia had cared about Harman. Wouldn't she have said something back? Insulted her? Told her she would kill her for killing him?

"She's pissed off about her boyfriend, Claire. She's not gonna talk to us," said Chris, loading a fresh clip into his rifle and swaying back, barely dodging another wave of flames.

Claire caught one of the tentacles in the side and flew across the platform. She struck the railing, and it actually bent under the impact. Groaning, she raised herself on her elbows, then struggled to her feet. Her ankle still hurt deeply, warm blood soaking through her pant-leg; she had probably torn the stitches. But adrenaline dulled the pain, and she fired her rifle at Alexia, managing to hit her in the chest.

This time, Alexia collapsed. Alexia had probably reached her limit, though that was never a good thing when it came to bioweapons. When Claire had killed Birkin in Raccoon City, he had mutated several times before he had eventually died.

There was a voice Claire did not recognize. She looked up, saw a man on a monitor-screen high above the platform. The man had a British accent, the sort that belonged to BBC newscasters. His hair was red, and so was his neat beard. He wore a sober gray suit, and he looked very serious.

"The year is 1983. My name is Alexander Ashford," said the man, from across the years. "If you're seeing this video, then my daughter Alexia has reached a critical stage, her point of no return..."

Claire expected a response from Alexia. But Alexia said nothing, and she started to swell, her body rising, opening like a grotesque flower of skin and organs. More of the tentacles rose from beneath the platform, rising from the depths of the room like the stamens of some primordial plant, or the tentacles of some enormous deep-sea beast. Alexia, or at least Alexia's torso, sprouted from the organ-meat flower, and resembled a preying mantis with long spidery forceps that reminded Claire of the arms of Kali.

Alexander Ashford was still talking. "She has begun to experiment on her own body, and this is the only way I could think of that would help her."

Claire heard something disengage, maybe a magnetic lock. Beyond the Alexia-thing, contained in a shatterproof glass locker, she saw a sleek gun, which vaguely looked like a rifle, and looked as if it had been designed as a prop for a science fiction movie.

"This is the only way. If Alexia has reached this critical of a point, there is no stopping her. There is no reasoning with her," said Alexander. "Kill her, whoever you are. Whether you're with Umbrella or against us, it doesn't matter. It's imperative—imperative to _humanity_ —that my daughter doesn't release this thing, the T-Veronica, into the world." There was a worried crease in Alexander's forehead, and he was silent for several moments, staring at the lower left-hand corner of the screen. He looked very tired then, like a man who had given up on the world, and who no longer wanted to be bothered by it. Then he said, "I pray the launcher works," and vanished, the screen inert.

"Guess we need that gun," said Chris, and he started running, narrowly avoiding one of Alexia's tentacles and diving for Alexander's launcher. He got it, rolling onto his back and firing the launcher up at Alexia.

There was a bright blue beam, like a laser, and it hit Alexia with a flash-bang that hurt Claire's eyes. Even when it hit her, Alexia did not scream. Her body started pulsating, then the pulsating became steadily more violent, and she started to twitch like an epileptic and swell, like a balloon someone blew too much air into. Chris got up and ran, and he lunged, hitting the ground on his belly.

Alexia exploded, bits of her coating the room, a pervasive raw-stink filling the air, similar to the unpleasant organic odor after a stink bug had been crushed, but compounded several times over.

Chris tossed the launcher aside and said, "It's empty. Come on." He carried her piggyback and headed in the direction of the hangar, which had been adjacent to the garage. Dimly, the intercom voice announced they had an hour to get out.

Alfred's jet was still parked inside the hangar, and seemed to be intact. Chris helped her up into the cockpit and climbed in after her, flipping a few switches and working the throttle-stick. The jet started to move, and then it was hurtling down the runway, the turbines screaming in her ears, making them pop. Then the facility was falling away below them, beyond a screen of snow, and Chris was laughing, saying they had made it.

Claire half-expected one of Alexia's tentacles to swat them from the sky. Nothing happened. Claire grinned uncontrollably, because they were alive, and they were finally leaving this place. Above the clouds, the sky was a clear bright blue, and the sun was shining beyond the cockpit glass.

When they had put enough distance between themselves and the Antarctica facility, Chris spoke. "I'm sorry we couldn't save Steve." He was quiet again, the hum of the jet-engines hanging in the air between them.

"I didn't see him in the atrium," she said, watching the back of her brother's head. "What do you think that means, Chris?"

In the closeness of the cockpit, Claire could smell her brother's stale sweat, as well as her own. Chris said, "Not sure. Wesker might have had something to do with it. I know he won't die back there."

Claire did not like the idea that Steve might have been collected as a potential experiment. Birkin had had that same madness to him, that same obsession that all Umbrella scientists seemed to share, and that was their need to experiment, their need for viruses. "I don't like the idea of Steve becoming a bioweapon," she said.

"It's a possibility we can't ignore, Goob," said Chris, and she could hear the frown in his voice.

They flew in silence for a while. Claire watched the clouds beyond the cockpit, her thoughts cycling back to that uneasy feeling she had felt when Alexia had confronted them, and had said nothing at all.

"You still thinking about Steve?"

"Always. But not right now," said Claire, still staring out the window. She wasn't really watching anything. She had wandered into mind-grayness. "I'm thinking about Alexia."

"She's dead, Claire," said Chris. "What's their to think about? You should be happy."

"Something didn't feel right, Chris. That Alexia felt empty."

"She was a monster, Claire. The virus changed her."

"Back at the mansion, Alexia was emotive. She cried when I shot Harman. Didn't you hear her yell?"

"Claire, it was the virus," said Chris, with finality. "She lost Harman. Then lost whatever was left of her fucking mind, and slipped under the virus's influence."

Claire still wasn't convinced. Sure, she had seen Chris kill Alexia with that thing Alexia's father had left them. And she could not imagine how there could have been two Alexias. The idea seemed absurd, but so had the idea of a woman in cryostasis. "Maybe I'm just being paranoid," she finally said, because she was trying to convince herself that she was just paranoid.

"You are, Goob," said Chris. "Alexia is dead. We could have used her, sure, but maybe it was for the best how things ended up. You heard what that guy Alexander Ashford said. He sounded scared, like he was seriously worried about Alexia getting out of there." He paused. "Sorry I yelled at you before. About Harman. It was probably for the best that he died too. The guy was crazy, might have hurt someone."

"It's fine, Chris," said Claire. She had already forgotten about their argument; it seemed so far away now, something that had happened to someone else. "I don't think she would have cooperated anyway."


	31. Part Three - The Rescue Party

They had finally arrived at the safe-room, with an hour to spare until detonation. It looked a lot like the bunkers he had seen in historical photographs from the Second World War, though much more technical and elaborate, with machines and ferroconcrete reinforced with some sort of experimental steel-compound Umbrella had come up with, or so Alexia had said.

"Still don't get how we're gonna survive this," said Grayson, watching Alexia punch her credentials into a terminal mounted by the door. A biometric scan cycled, which Grayson thought was pretty cool because the tech was still experimental in most places, and had only existed, fully functioning, in science fiction films. "How does this place even have biometrics, Alexia?" he asked. "They just developed a commercial system for it, about a year ago."

"I developed it of course, based off pattern recognition research from the 1960s," said Alexia, grinning proudly. "You're talking to the woman who created a cryostasis pod, Grayson. And you're surprised I have a biometric scanner? I designed this entire room." She rolled her eyes and opened the door, once the biometric scan had fully cycled.

The room was surprisingly cozy, and made to look like a Victorian parlor that reflected Alexia's peculiar tastes. He didn't even feel as if he'd just stepped into a bomb-shelter, but felt as if he'd stepped into someone's old home. "Okay, so this is nice," he said, studying a Tiffany lamp. "But how are we gonna survive the fucking bomb?" The door automatically sealed behind him, with a pressurized hiss.

"The bomb isn't a bloody nuclear bomb, Grayson. We're not going the way of Nagasaki, so shut up and stop fussing," said Alexia, giving him a slight friendly push. She seemed to be in a good mood. "I designed this room," she repeated, giving him a look. "Are you questioning the integrity of my design?"

Grayson gently shoved her back and grinned. "Don't shove me, nerd," he said, feeling elated, relieved. They were going to escape the facility alive, and the Redfields wouldn't be any wiser, and neither would Wesker. And if Wesker thought they were dead, that also meant they would be in Bingham's blind-spot. "We did good," he said. "Leave it to you to come up with a plan to pull our asses out of the fire, Alexia."

Alexia was still grinning. Alexia, in a very uncharacteristic and playful way, started mussing his hair, and looked as if she was barely holding in her excitement. "I didn't think the Redfields would be stupid enough—scratch that, yes, I did think they would be stupid enough to fall for the bait-and-switch."

"And damn, did they buy it," said Grayson, laughing. "God, I can't wait to get out of Antarctica." He'd been thinking of several things he wanted to do, once they escaped the facility. He definitely wanted to take a vacation somewhere warm, maybe the Caribbean, or the Canaries. He wanted a long, hot shower. He wanted to eat good Italian food. He would get an apartment, or maybe Alexia would want to go back to her family manor in England—and he would come with her of course—and he would make love to Alexia several times, then binge-watch 1960s surf and beach party movies, or maybe some Vincent Price stinkers, because they were absolutely terrible, and that was what made them great.

"You've that Alexia-I'm-thinking-and-I-want-to-tell-you look," said Alexia, and she lay down on a faint couch, lounging there like a bored cat.

"I was thinking about when we get out of here," said Grayson, deciding now was probably the best time to talk about that sort of thing, since they were out of immediate danger, secure behind a reinforced vault-door. "I was thinking a vacation. Bermuda? Maybe the Virgin Islands? Hear St. Croix is nice." He pushed her legs out of the way so he could sit beside her, but Alexia just draped her legs across his lap instead. Grayson laughed, rubbing her knee. "You even listening to me, Alexia?" he asked.

"Of course I'm listening to you, Grayson," said Alexia, looking at him. "I can't. Once we leave with the retrieval team, Lord Spencer will undoubtedly put me back to work. And I've a few experiments I still want to perform." She smiled, twirling a lock of golden hair around her finger. "I'll tell you about them, in due time."

Grayson frowned, running his hand down her leg. She had beautiful legs, he decided. They were long, the sort of legs that belonged on runway models. "Just a few weeks, Alexia," he said. "A couple of weeks to reintroduce you to the world." He grinned. "You could use a tan anyway." He did not actually think Alexia needed a tan; he liked her skin the way it was.

"We English don't tan. We burn," joked Alexia, chuckling.

"I'd still love you the same. Even if you looked like a boiled lobster."

"It's so strange hearing you say that again," said Alexia, suddenly serious. "I've never had anyone tell me that they love me, Grayson. Except you. Father never did. Alfred heavily implied it, but he was never very good with words. Well, outside of those little sonnets he used to write, and thought I knew nothing about." She looked amused.

"Well, I do. Just don't go getting all weird and sentimental on me, Alexia." Grayson laughed. "That's not your style."

She sat up and kissed him. Then she said, "I love you too, Grayson." Alexia made a face, gestured dismissively. "Ugh. You're right. Sentimentality doesn't suit me." She smiled then, and added, "But I do mean it."

He patted her thigh and said, "I know you do, Alexia."

"I suppose we could go to St. Croix, once I've spoken to Lord Spencer," she said, and lay back down on the faint couch, closing her eyes. "We could rent a bungalow on the beach. It would be nice, I think."

"I'll be sure to get the strongest sunscreen I can find."

"I've also been thinking about a few things." Alexia opened her pale blue eyes, watching him. "It wouldn't be proper for an Ashford woman to rove about with a man she isn't married to. You did make a promise, back when we were children. 'She's kind of short and nerdy, and has a bit of an ego' were your exact words, I believe, when describing your intended."

Grayson laughed, shaking his head. "First off, we don't live in 1870 anymore, Alexia. So drop the 'intended' and 'proper of an Ashford woman' thing. You're not going to risk becoming a spinster." He cracked a huge smile. "Second, I can't believe you remembered what I said." He paused, staring at the floor, thinking, his laughter dying to a throat-chuckle. Then, jokingly, "But I _guess_ I could marry you."

"This was one of the worst proposals ever," said Alexia, laughing.

"Hey, it works for us."

"It does. I was never much for showboating, Grayson."

"We can get married in St. Croix," he said, and bobbed his head affirmatively. "Something small, and on the beach."

"Sounds lovely."

"And," he continued, looking at her, "you can go right back to work, once we hit stateside. I know you want to get to the bottom of this shit with Bingham. I'll help you."

"You're going to naturalize me into a yank, Grayson?" Alexia shook her head, amused. "The sacrifices I make for you," she added, smirking.

"I won't make you move to New Jersey, I promise," he said. "Though my aunt's probably going to want to say hello. The one down in Atlantic City. She liked you, and would probably want to know you're not dead. She may even want to throw a party, where you'll get to meet _all_ my relatives."

"Joy," said Alexia, with precisely no joy. "Your aunt's still alive?"

Grayson nodded. "Somehow."

There was a faint rumbling around them, and Grayson figured it was probably the bombs, and wondered if this was how people had felt down in their shelters, when the Luftwaffe had bombed London. The room shook as the aftershocks worked through the facility, rendering what sat above them into concrete-rebar dust. Then the shaking stopped, and Alexia said, "Now we simply wait for the retrieval team."

At first, he'd been okay with waiting; he had Alexia to talk to. But the hours crept by, and nobody came, and he started to wonder if anyone would actually come. Had Spencer forgotten his deal with Alexia, or had he neglected to appoint someone else if something had happened to him? Grayson tried to occupy his mind with other things, but found it difficult. He was hungry, so he helped himself to a can of pork and beans he'd found in a food crate and ate it cold. When he returned to the main room, Grayson found Alexia pacing a rut in the cherry-wood.

"If they never come, and we run out of a food, and I die before you," said Grayson, finishing his beans and tossing the can into a nearby wastebasket, "you have my permission to eat me, Alexia."

"I'm not going to eat you, Grayson. And they _will_ come," said Alexia. "Lord Spencer, even if he did die, wouldn't neglect to appoint a successor. That, and Umbrella would send a clean-up detail regardless." She looked at him and frowned. "Besides," she added, "why would I eat you? If we're going to starve to death, I might as well not starve alone."

"Good point," he said, and shrugged, leaning against the doorway. He jerked a thumb behind him. "There's food in there. But you probably already knew that."

"I'm not hungry right now," said Alexia, and shook her head.

"You haven't eaten anything since that little bit of beans, when we had Alfred's wake," said Grayson, frowning. "You need something in your stomach, Alexia. Sure, you got a virus, but you still need human basics like food."

"You're sounding like your father," said Alexia.

"Hey. Dad always looked out for you. Had to practically shove dinner down your throat, couple of times."

"I'm not hungry, Grayson."

Grayson shrugged. "Fine," he said. "Jesus, you're still hard-headed."

"It's an Ashford trait," said Alexia wryly. She stopped pacing. "Drove Scott absolutely crazy. How is he?"

"Dad died. Alfred was getting out of hand with his psychosis, so dad went to Hoboken. Died from a heart-attack there."

Alexia looked upset. "Scott's dead?" she said, and then she fell silent for a long time. "He was the closest thing I had to an actual father, you know," said Alexia finally. "He was better than Alexander. He took care of me, took care of my brother."

"He didn't want to leave Alfred," said Grayson, remembering the last conversation he'd had with his father in the foyer of the Rockfort mansion. His father had had a leather suitcase in his hand, had been dressed in one of his best suits, and he'd pleaded with Grayson not to turn him out, because Alfred needed him. "Dad was getting older, and couldn't keep up with Alfred, or his chores," he said. "It was putting a lot of stress on his heart. Eventually, I told him to leave, and that I'd handle it. I moved away from Raccoon City, not too long before the outbreak, and went to Rockfort." He paused. "It's a shame. My dad would have been happy to hear we're getting married. He knew I loved you, and he loved you like a daughter."

Alexia did not say anything for a long time, probably processing. Then, "An outbreak in Raccoon City? Was it the Arklay Laboratory?"

Grayson nodded. "It's gone now, and so is the Spencer estate. Spencer wasn't there when shit went down, so you don't have to worry."

There was a noise at the door, and Grayson realized the noise was a blow-torch, and it was carving through the vault-door in plumes of blue-white sparks. The shape that had been cut into the door was pushed away, and inside stepped the largest Russian he'd ever seen. Grayson knew that Russian too; Alfred had introduced him to the man when he'd come to inspect Rockfort, and who Grayson had seen, fifteen years ago, at Spencer's party. Sergei Vladimir.

Sergei Vladimir grinned. He was massive, roughly the same size, color, and shape of a polar bear standing on its hind-legs. His face was square and craggy, gray hair cut close to his large skull. There was a crescent-shaped scar over his right eye, which contorted oddly with his grin, and a few days worth of coarse stubble on his face. He wore bulky black fatigues and thermal gear, the Umbrella hexagon emblazoned over the breast-pocket of his jacket.

"Is good to see you! My, my, Alexia. You have grown," said Sergei, grinning with large square teeth. "Lord Spencer regrets he could not come, but is very cold here for such an old man." He laughed, and it was a deep laugh that made Grayson think of mountain caverns. "So he sends me, his right-hand. You probably do not remember me very well, yes?"

Grayson looked at Alexia. Alexia's expression was unreadable. Then she said, "I remember you, Sergei. We met briefly when I had visited the Arklay Laboratory, as I recall."

"Was also at party, but we did not talk for long there," said Sergei, still grinning. "I was also very much younger then. Lord Spencer has put me in charge of Caucasus Laboratory now, where I will begin work on a new tyrant." Sergei wagged his finger. Then he said, "But this no time to talk of business. Come, come. We have transport waiting for you and Mr. Harman. My men will provide you with thermal gear, so you do not freeze."


	32. Interlude 16: Done with This Business

Wesker had already put the facility several miles behind him. He watched great clouds of fire billowing up from the ruins of the base, which jutted from the snowdrifts, dune-like in their immensity, the pieces of the facility like the concrete teeth of some sleeping giant. There wasn't much left of the base: piles of ferroconcrete and glass, twisted lengths of rebar, and part of the hangar, which Wesker had seen a jet take off from not too long ago. The Redfields had escaped, it seemed; but that did not matter to him. He had what he had come for.

There were only a handful of mercenaries left. Alpha Team had been wiped out; their link had gone dead, and even if it had only been a bug, they were certainly dead now, gone in the explosion. A few people from Charlie Company had survived, and even fewer from Beta. It had been Beta who had dragged the bodies from the facility.

Wesker looked down at the black plastic bag and unzipped it, staring at Steve Burnside's dead face. That had been the name he had found on a scrap of the boy's prisoner jacket; Steve had either come with Claire, or he had escaped aboard one of the other planes. He zipped the bag back up. The other bag was Callahan, though there had not been much left of him when they had found him. "If anything," said Wesker aloud, "you are going to be the more viable sample, Burnside."

Beta Team, and some people from Charlie, took the bags and loaded them onto the plane. His communication line pinged. Wesker opened it, listening. It was Bingham.

"Did you retrieve the T-Veronica sample?" asked Bingham, his voice a cold noise, with a vague Transatlantic bend. He sounded like a bored 1930s newscaster, Wesker decided. "I've been trying to get through to you, Albert, but you've been ignoring my calls."

"I was busy, sir," said Wesker, turning away from the plane, watching the black smoke on the gray horizon. "But yes, we've retrieved a viable sample of the virus, and it will be en route to you shortly." Wesker did not tell Bingham about Steve; he intended to keep Steve for his own research purposes.

"What of Alexia?" asked Bingham. "Is she with you?"

"Alexia is dead," said Wesker, even though he did not entirely believe that. Alexia wasn't stupid, and would not go the desperate way Birkin had gone. Alexia knew that even the most carefully laid plans were always the ones with the greatest chance to fall apart, and that there were no certainties in their particularly volatile line of work. He had taught her well. "There was an altercation," he added.

There was a long pause on the line. When Bingham did speak, his voice shook with anger. "What do you mean she's _dead_?" he snapped, and from the sound of it, Bingham was clenching his teeth, and clenching quite hard.

"I tried to convince her to come quietly, Dr. Bingham," said Wesker. "An interloper destroyed my leverage, and the deal fell through."

"What of Grayson Harman?" he asked, and his tone had cooled. "I know he was there. Callahan had sent a report."

"Callahan is dead. Alexia killed him. Infected him with the T-Veronica," said Wesker. He started toward the jet, the snow crunching under his boots, the wind howling in his ears. "I'll forward the full report soon, sir. As for Grayson Harman, Harman is dead. He was my leverage. The interloper shot him in the head."

"He's dead?" Now Bingham's voice had a certain quality to it, a rage-smolder. It was that point of anger people reached when they had hit the very bottom of their tolerance, and had to focus entirely on their words to maintain coherency.

"He's dead. I saw it myself, and have his blood on my face to prove it," said Wesker, scraping at the congealed blood on his cheek.

The line went dead. Bingham had hung up on him.

"Someone's angry," said Wesker, shaking his head. He did not really care. He had done his part, and had gotten the T-Veronica sample, as outlined in his contract. Once they returned to base, Wesker would collect his payment and be done with the mercenary business. He decided he did not very much like working for other people anyway.


	33. Part Three - Lord Spencer

Sergei brought them aboard a plane, the Umbrella logo painted on its fuselage. The plane, Grayson decided, looked like a stealth prototype, something that belonged in a secret military hangar where they reverse-engineered Area 51 tech. It was painted matte black, and did not make much noise. The engines were a slow purr. There were guys around the plane, waiting for them, and they were dressed like Sergei in bulky military fatigues and thermal gear.

Inside, the plane was pretty roomy, the sort of plane used in military parachute exercises. There were long benches on the walls, and nylon harnesses, and several Umbrella guys in balaclavas. When one of the guys saw Alexia, he tugged down his balaclava, and he was grinning with dull old man teeth.

Sergei directed them to sit on one of the benches, and they did. He helped them with their harnesses, then sat down opposite them, lighting a cigarette as the ramp-hatch swung shut, and the last guys had boarded the plane.

"Thought I'd never see you again, Director Ashford," said the man with old man teeth. "You don't know me, but I worked for you back in the 1980s. Always liked you as a boss, despite the common opinion."

That common opinion, Grayson knew, had been that very few people had actually liked her. He understood why; Alexia had been known to regularly deny vacation and transfer requests, and she had run the facility like a tyrant with two iron fists. And for most people, she had been very difficult to get along with because of her age, and because of her ego. But for people, like the old man in the balaclava, who had done their work, had kept their heads down and had never asked too many questions, Alexia had actually been a pretty amicable boss, or so Grayson had been told.

"I'm afraid I don't remember you," said Alexia. She wore a black thermal jacket, which had been supplied by Sergei's men, the Umbrella logo stitched above the breast-pocket.

"It was a long time ago, Director. Just know there are folks who are glad to have you back," said the old man in the balaclava, who bummed a cigarette from Sergei and went quiet. The package had been some sort of Russian brand; Grayson did not recognize it.

"You were very popular among some of the scientists, Alexia," said Sergei, grinning around his cigarette. He folded his enormous arms over his chest, watching them with his good eye. "Birkin was too short-tempered. They think, 'This man, he does not know what it means to lead.' But you? Yes, you made quite the impression. That is why Spencer gave you the Antarctica facility. I am sorry it is gone. Your life had been there."

"There will be more laboratories," said Alexia, and shook her head. "This had always been the plan."

The old man in the balaclava nodded and blew smoke, but did not contribute to the conversation.

"So tell me, Alexia," said Sergei, shifting in his seat, the leather upholstery squeaking underneath him. "Why is Mr. Harman with you?" He jerked his head at Grayson: _him_. His large body bobbed and swayed as the plane hit a bit of turbulence. "And where is Alfred? I thought Alfred was supposed to wake you."

"Alfred's dead," said Grayson, frowning. "I came with him to the facility."

Sergei looked disappointed, though it was hard to tell because of the craggy-roughness of his face. Then he said, putting the cigarette out on his glove, "I am sorry he is dead." He looked at Grayson with his foggy blue eye, blowing a cloud of smoke. "You are infected?" he asked, shifting the subject.

Grayson had almost forgotten about his eyes. He nodded. "Yeah," he said. "Bingham's prototype."

Sergei nodded. "Well, you seem to have adapted it, Mr. Harman. Congratulations."

"It only took me getting shot in the head," said Grayson, and smiled, because the memory was a lot funnier in hindsight.

"Death is the catalyst for such viruses," said Sergei, with all the airs of some worldly scholar. "Albert Wesker was impaled by one of our tyrants, and he died. But now he is back." He looked between them, his mouth a crooked line, as if it had been cut with a dull knife. There was a certain tangible sobriety that radiated from Sergei, similar in feeling to the force exerted by two magnets as they repelled one another, and that force was pushing against Grayson. Sergei said, seriously, "Our intel says he was at the Antarctica base."

"He was," said Alexia, glancing at Grayson. "Albert was trying to bargain with me. He wanted the T-Veronica. That was how Grayson wound up getting shot." She reached over and touched the back of his hand, and Grayson smiled. "A girl named Claire Redfield shot him, a survivor who had commandeered one of the planes from Rockfort Prison." She looked back at Sergei, adding, "He was working for a group called the Hive/Host Capture Force, a mercenary group hired by Martin Bingham."

Sergei looked interested. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, fingers knotted together. "Martin Bingham, you say? He is still alive?" He made a gruff noise that might have been a laugh, might have been him trying to choke down a cough. "You must tell Lord Spencer this."

"I had already planned to," said Alexia.

Grayson slept for the rest of the flight. When he woke, they'd already landed, and Sergei was telling him to get up. It was kind of warm when they got off the plane, so Grayson took off his arctic gear, after he'd helped Alexia out of hers.

They were in the woods, on a strip of tarmac. A castle on a rocky hill not far from them; beyond that hill, the deep twilight-blue expanse of a lake, and the purple ghosts of mountains on the far shore. The sky was a purplish velvet, studded with silver pinholes.

Grayson did not recognize this place. He followed Sergei's lumbering form up a long cobbled walkway, to the broad doors of the castle. A tired-looking butler answered the door and waved them inside.

The inside was all marble and stone, polished to a mirror-like shine. An enormous crystal chandelier lit the place up in soft incandescence, made the foyer glitter. There were decorative suits of armor, and old pictures hanging on the walls that depicted haunted landscapes, or bored-looking noblemen in cravats and dark tailcoats. The butler led them upstairs, then through a door.

The room was large and empty, and drafty like a cellar. There was an inert marble fireplace, a coat-of-arms bolted above it; some decorative china vases; displays of medieval weapons on arterial red ultrasuede. The room, Grayson decided, looked like a museum's storage-room, where all the forgotten or discontinued exhibits sat collecting dust.

There was a very old man in the room. Face deeply wrinkled, like the topographic lines of a map. He was wheelchair-bound, and sat crooked, like a dead wind-bent desert tree. His legs were scrawny things, the skin the exact color and texture of old parchment. He was connected to an oxygen tank; when he breathed, it was like dry dust blown through a tube.

"Alexia, is that you?" said the old man, the corners of his mouth wet and red. He beckoned for Alexia with long, arthritic hands. "Let me look at you, my dear." The old man's lips peeled back, showing a dull lopsided smile. "It's been so long," he wheezed, and his oxygen-tank gave a loud _poosh_. "Come, come, my dear. I can't see very well anymore."

Alexia stepped closer. The old man watched her with cloudy hazel eyes. "Lord Spencer," she said, taking the old man's hands. She had to kneel to look him in the eyes, which were nested in deep pockets of wrinkled parchment-flesh. "It's good to see you again."

"You're so beautiful now, Alexia," said Spencer, touching her face with his long yellow-gray fingers. He kissed her once, on each cheek. "Edward, rest my old friend's soul, would be so proud to see the woman you've grown into." He looked past Alexia, and said to Sergei, "Thank you, Sergei. You have done splendidly. You may go now, however. The Caucasus Laboratory requires your oversight, old friend."

"Of course, Lord Spencer," said Sergei, and bowed. He lumbered away.

"My cryostasis experiment was a success, Lord Spencer," said Alexia, smiling. "I assimilated the virus."

"I'm glad to hear it, child. You haven't forgotten your end of the bargain, I hope."

"I haven't, Lord Spencer."

"Good," said Spencer, stroking her blonde hair in a grandfatherly way. "My prognosis is not good. And these idiot doctors have done nothing but find ways to _prolong_ my suffering." Spencer stopped, then started coughing; and it was a wet, violent cough that lasted for several minutes. Then, once the sputtering and the hacking had stopped, he said, "But you, child? You'll certainly fix things, I'm sure. You were always one of my best, Alexia. One of my favorites."

"It's why you kept me alive, is it not, Lord Spencer?" said Alexia, and stood. "We already have a viable subject for Project Wesker."

Spencer shook his head and said, "No, no. Albert and I do not see eye-to-eye anymore, child."

"Not Albert, Lord Spencer," said Alexia, and she came over and pulled him, half-stumbling, to Spencer. "You might recall my butler, Grayson Harman?" She grinned, and Grayson could not decide if the grin was malicious, or if it was a perfectly harmless grin. "He's been infected with Bingham's prototype," she added, helpfully.

"You're going to _experiment_ on me?"

"Not experiment, dear. I simply need a blood sample," said Alexia, and kissed him.

Spencer laughed wetly, then exploded into another violent, chest-rumbling early-in-the-morning cough. He hacked for several moments, clawing at the sparse grizzled hairs on his chest. Then said, "It seems dear little Alexia already has you back on the leash, my dear boy."

"Worse places to be, Lord Spencer."

"There's something else I wanted to tell you, Lord Spencer," said Alexia. "Martin Bingham. He's still alive."

Their expressions told him to leave; so he did.

Grayson waited in the hallway. When Spencer and Alexia's conversation finally finished, Alexia emerged from the room, looking serious. One of Spencer's servants entered the room after her, carrying a tray of prescription bottles, and syrettes wrapped in sterile plastic. "Spencer had no idea Bingham was still in operation," she said, and they walked down the corridor, past medieval tapestries and austere portraits. "So we're dead on leads, and can only hope something crops up."

"Something always crops up," said Grayson, and sighed, pushing his hands inside his pockets. "What now?" he asked, once they had descended the stairs, and stood under the chandelier in the foyer. "There somewhere specific we're headed to?"

"As a matter of fact, yes," said Alexia, looking at him. "Spencer has graciously given us his mansion in the Arklays."

"That place blew up, Alexia."

She shook her head. "Not _that_ mansion," said Alexia. "There was an older property Spencer's family had built, though the laboratory there is brand new." She grinned excitedly. "He calls the lab New Arklay. I've been appointed as its new Chief of Research."

"How many mansions does Spencer _have_?"

"I start in two weeks, once the current Chief of Research clears out."

"Two weeks? Knowing you, I thought you'd start tomorrow."

"We're getting married in St. Croix, aren't we?"

Grayson smiled.


	34. Part Three - End - The New Game

Two years had passed since Alexia had taken over New Arklay.

They had settled at Spencer's second estate, which was enormous, and built in some vague Queen Anne style. They were the neighborhood eccentrics, and though people mostly stayed away from them in the nearby community of Pine Peak, the locals took a weird sort of pride in the fact that their town had rich eccentrics. Occasionally, they would receive local reporters from Ashbury, Raccoon's sister city, who had wanted to interview Alexia. A curious film major had even driven up to their house once, all the way from San Francisco, because they had wanted to do a final project on the Ashfords, the last of the Umbrella founding families.

Since they had moved into the mansion, they had cleaned the place up. The fountain out front, of the Grecian woman with the vase, was functional again, and he had put in several new flower-beds. Alexia had decorated the inside, with very little input from him. The place reminded him of the Rockfort mansion: arterial red walls, cherry-wood floors, gilded candelabras (which Alexia had told him had come from the Ashford's manor house in England), oriental rugs, and Victorian furniture that was all curves and cushions. Alexia's pride, however, was the enormous crystal chandelier in the foyer, which she had purchased at an auction about a year ago, when the Austrians had liquidated a Viennese opera house.

It was a rainy summer evening. They were lying on the couch together in the parlor and watching _Nightmare On Elm Street,_ because Alexia had yet to see it, and Grayson considered that a sin. Grayson liked the fact that New Arklay was right under their feet; it gave Alexia free time she'd never had as a girl, so they were able to do stupid everyday things that most people took for granted, like watching movies on rainy Saturday nights.

The doorbell rang. Grayson glanced at the numeral clock on the wall, and it said it was a quarter to midnight. He wondered who could be stopping by this late; he had not ordered anything, and it wasn't as if Alexia and him had friends. "You get the door," said Grayson, yawning. "I don't feel like getting up."

"I give _you_ orders," said Alexia, stretching out on the couch. "You do it. I don't feel like getting up either."

The doorbell rang again. "Please, Alexia?" he asked, with a drippy smile.

Grayson knew Alexia did not want to get up, but did anyway. She threw a pillow at his face and said, "You're a jackass." He playfully kicked her in the butt, just enough to make her stumble a little. "A jackass," she repeated, smiling, padding barefoot across the parlor.

He heard the door open, and a familiar voice, sliding through the TV-lit darkness of the parlor like an oil-slick. "Don't look so happy to see me," Grayson heard Albert Wesker say. Grayson jolted to his feet and went into the hallway. Wesker stood in the door, dressed in a rain-stained black suit and designer sunglasses. When he saw him, Wesker said, "Harman? My, you're still alive. So the rumors _were_ true. You were infected."

"Why are you here, Albert?" asked Alexia impatiently. The pattering of rain, and the distant roll of summer thunder, filled the house.

"Have your manners dulled in just two short years, Alexia? A good host invites their guest inside."

"A vampire can't cross a threshold unless I give it permission, Albert."

"Hah. Funny," said Wesker, in the sort of voice which said it was not, in fact, at all funny. Rain beaded on his broad shoulders, the orange lights of the porch-lamps reflected in his sunglasses. He pushed his hands inside his pockets and stood there in the glow, statuesque, his pale face seamless and patient underneath the sunglasses, mouth a thin, hard line.

"Get out of here, Wesker," said Grayson. "Or I'll _make_ you get out."

"Don't think that because you're infected, you're suddenly a big boy, Harman," said Wesker, his demeanor as coldly professional as it had been in Antarctica. He put his black-gloved hands up, in a show pacifism. "I'm here with a proposition. Before it was just business, Harman. You understand. I'm not in the mercenary racket anymore."

Alexia gave Grayson a look, and the look said: _I'm letting him in_. She moved out of the way. Wesker stepped inside, shaking off the rain. "What do you want, Albert?" she asked, and she did sound as if she was genuinely curious as to why he had shown up, a quarter-to-midnight, at their lonely home in the middle of the Arklay boondocks.

"To talk," said Wesker, and stepped inside the parlor, looking around. When he saw the television, he grinned with white teeth. "Nightmare on Elm Street? I didn't take you for that sort of woman, Alexia."

"What do you _want_ , Albert?"

Grayson sat on the couch and watched them. Wesker turned to Alexia, hands still in his pockets. Wesker had a certain presence to him, where he always seemed to loom, fill copious space. "It's about Bingham," he said. "Little birdy says you were looking for him. I might know where to find him."

Alexia was silent. Grayson could tell her interest had been piqued.

"See, I thought you'd say as much," said Wesker, wagging his finger. He paused, turning toward the sound of small footsteps in the corridor. "Who's this?" he said, with a meaningless smile.

A little dark-haired girl stood in the doorway of the parlor, in her pajamas, clutching a stuffed tiger, toddler-complaining that they were loud, and that she could not sleep because of their loudness. Before Alexia could reach her, Wesker scooped the girl up, who cried and bubbled because she did not know him. Eventually, she settled down, hiccuping. Wesker grinned as if he had hit the lottery.

Grayson stood up. "Put her down," he warned. Then, to the girl, who was uncertain of the man in the sunglasses, "It's all right, Veronica." Veronica looked at him, her little forehead creased with confusion. "He's not going to hurt you. Daddy's not going to let him."

"Veronica?" Wesker tapped Veronica on the nose, who giggled and grabbed at his hands, apparently no longer scared of the stranger in the suit. "She looks just like you, Alexia."

Grayson could see the nervousness in Alexia's eyes. "Put her down," she said, her tone ice-cold. "This _instant_ , Albert."

"I have a son, you know," said Wesker, conversationally. Veronica wrapped her small fist around his thumb and pulled at it, and Wesker told her to stop that, it wasn't nice. "He's nine, though I haven't seen him or his mother in years." He looked at Veronica, brushing tousled dark hair from her wide gray eyes. She put a finger in her mouth and mumbled something sleepy. "It would be a _shame_ if Bingham found out about her. And about your husband." Wesker looked at Alexia. "Congratulations, by the way. On both accounts."

Alexia looked defeated. She sat down on the couch and said, "Your proposition."

Wesker passed Veronica to Alexia, who held the child as if she was some sacred fragile thing. Veronica immediately started to fall asleep on Alexia's shoulder, as if the closeness of Alexia's body had soothed her, her small arms wound around the stuffed tiger in a choke-hold. "Good. I have your attention." Wesker leaned back on the couch. "Bingham is becoming a thorn in my side," he began. "He's amassed a considerable power-base, selling Umbrella goods to various organizations. Right under your nose, Alexia." He smiled mechanically; but the smile quickly disappeared. "He's getting in my way of certain ventures. Spencer is going to die soon, and there _will_ be a vacuum. What I'm offering you is a bulwark."

"I don't see what I get out of this other than a massive headache," said Alexia, cradling Veronica in her arm, who had fallen fast asleep, drooling on her stuffed toy.

"Money, of course. As I hear it, the Ashford well is running dry. Poor spending on your brother's part, mostly. Put himself in debt to several shady people, Alexia." He tilted his head, grinning like a skull. "But I can make that all go away. I have connections among the Global Pharmaceutical Consortium, and in other places. Work for me, and you'll have money, resources to continue your work on Project W, and your own pursuits."

"How do you know about Project—"

Wesker cut her off. "I've learned several interesting things in the last two years," he said, wagging his finger. He glanced at Grayson. "Your husband was a subject in the program. Unofficial. Spencer kept it very hush-hush."

Alexia frowned, shifting Veronica in her arm, who had, in her sleep, gotten a fistful of Alexia's hair. "What does Spencer have to do with anything?" she asked.

"Who do you think gave Bingham his identity?" said Wesker, laughing. "Helped him hide, all the while funding Bingham's research through a series of careful fronts and blinds? It was all Spencer. He was never one to waste resources. Always quite the hoarder, the old fuck. Which is precisely why he agreed to keep you alive, in deep-freeze. You were a valuable resource." He shrugged one shoulder. Then, "Of course, he's not going to be alive much longer."

Grayson could tell Alexia was having a hard time processing everything. She almost looked hurt. " _Nobody_ uses me," she said, through her teeth, even though Wesker was doing precisely that with his ultimatum. But Alexia did not have much of a choice; it was either drown in the flood, or build a boat, and she had decided to build a boat. "Fine. You have yourself a deal, Albert."

"Co-workers again, at long last," said Wesker, patting her on the shoulder. "Don't worry, Alexia. You don't have to do much. You see, the virus I have was a rough prototype. Not as finessed as your dear hubby's." He looked at Grayson, and Grayson could feel the envy creeping from behind his sunglasses. "I have to take stabilizer doses to keep the virus from hyper-mutating my body. I want you to fix that. Eliminate the need."

"I'll see what I can do, Albert," said Alexia miserably.

Wesker started toward the hall. "I need to take care of some things. Make a valuable connection with one Excella Gionne, of _the_ Gionnes. You might remember her father. He was a business associate of Alexander's." He made a dismissive gesture with his hand, then said, "I'll be in touch."

"What about Bingham?" said Alexia.

"Patience was never a strong suit of yours, Alexia," said Wesker, clicking his tongue. "Don't worry. Simply wait for my call."

And then Wesker was gone, the sound of the door slamming, and a car peeling away from their house into the wet night.


End file.
